Need an interpreter?

[karl]

Most of us have faced that terror of being trapped in a foreign country with little understanding or comprehension of the language.
Whether it is a parking sign that makes no sense, or a menu that is all Greek to you, an app for Android and iPhone could be the solution by translating words on-the-fly with the help of your camera lens.
WordLens uses your phone's inbuilt camera to recognise text that is viewed through the lens, and then translating them to English.
So far the app works for French, Spanish and Italian (so actually, if a menu is all Greek to you, it won't be much help).



There are comments to this article which state that this is not new


See link below for full story


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2170923/Word-Lens-Android-iPhone-app-instantly-translates-words-watch.html#ixzz208zMR9Eu

[Lights]

For short, simply phrases (like items on menus), this will probably work pretty well, but similar to an online translator, it will struggle with longer pieces of text. One problem translators always face is differentiating gender from nouns (items). For instance, in French, 'il' could mean 'he', but it could also mean 'it'. A translator will sometimes misinterpret what is intended, therefore causing the translation to be incorrect. Some people used translators in my French class these past 2 years, and this kind of thing would catch them out all the time when we got things like translation homeworks.

It's a nice concept, though. One of the developers said 'the translation isn’t perfect, but it gets the point across', and I think that is fair to say. The same can be said for many translators, however. The only difference is that this app provides a more practical, useful way of translating rather than having to whip out your smartphone to go online and access Google Translate or whatever.