Voting was fierce, but Google Translate came out on top with close to 45% of the votes cast. It makes sense: Google Translate is free, available to everyone at any time via the web or its mobile apps, can be used offline on smartphones, and is rolled into a number of applications and services for quick, easy translations. Plus, it offers voice pronunciations so you can hear what the words you're reading sound like.

Right on its heels though with 40% of the vote was a human translator - obviously the objective best translation option if you have one available, which is likely what earned it the most votes, but sadly not everyone has the luxury of finding a human translator every time they're reading an email, instruction manual, or twitter stream. Regardless, there's nothing better than knowing the languages at hand for not just literal translations, but definitions and context. In third place was Bing Translator, which offers camera-based OCR on Windows Phones and a free API for developers to plug into, with close to 7% of the vote. WordLens, the amazing camera-based translation app that will "see" text in another language and "display" it on your phone or tablet's screen in your language while you hold it up to the text, took fourth place with 5.5% of the overall vote. Linguee, the translation dictionary and reference database, brought up the rear with over 2% of the votes cast.

For more on each of these, make sure to head back to the full Hive Five feature for details.

(Lifehacker)