
Google Translate for Android Now Works With Photos - aritraghosh007
http://mashable.com/2012/08/10/google-translate-reads-text-photo/
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mtgx
Would it be possible to make this functionality available offline? I figure
devices are powerful enough today to not experience too big of a delay when
translating images, but I assume the engine would need quite a bit of storage?
When you travel you need something like this offline, not online.

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georgemcbay
I think the problem is more storage than power. I don't know exactly how
Google Translate works but I've heard it uses human translated information as
a corpus in an attempt to get natural-sounding translations (as opposed to the
goofy old babelfish type translations).

Eg. Someone is translating something from Russian to English. They'll look
back into their history of web pages which have human-translated Russian and
English versions to see if any phrases in Russian match what they are actively
translating and if they do, they'll attempt to incorporate the human-created
English translation of that into their translation. The data allowing for this
must be absolutely huge.

Having said that I'm sure they could do an offline version which didn't use
the fancy human-translated corpus data and just gave you the crappy babelfish-
style translation, which in a lot of real-world situations is good enough to
get the gist.

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mootothemax
This is fantastic - I tried it just now for Polish => English, and the
interface is very good, letting you highlight parts of the image that you want
translated.

Until now, when I've found a notice that makes _no_ sense to me, I've resorted
to taking a photo and then translating with a dead-tree dictionary once I got
home. This app is going to make it a _lot_ more difficult not to give in to
temptation and cheat with Google.

Whilst Google's Polish translations are pretty bad, they do the job for
translating random verbs, which give you enough. Something about using sitting
down with a paper dictionary helps the words stay in my head though.

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peterwwillis
With technology, nobody ever needs to retain information ever again. It's just
a Google away.

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mootothemax
_With technology, nobody ever needs to retain information ever again. It's
just a Google away._

That's a different - although interesting - discussion. You get so much more
from learning a language than just retaining information. I'd liken it to
learning the piano; whilst plenty of people are happy to press a button and
hear sounds come out, sometimes it's really nice to sit down and play, you
know? :)

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iag
Google, p-p-please make it available for iOS. Come on, make love, not war.

~~~
zalew
remember all those ios-first apps android users had to wait months for? karma
is a bitch. :)

~~~
shinratdr
To be fair this is exactly the same as it has always been. Google provides
exclusive features for its services via private APIs that only Android can
use. Everyone else has to use the public API, including Apple. As a result
Google-developed applications for their services that can utilize those
private APIs are better than the Apple-developed programs that hook into
Google services.

The good "iOS first" or "iOS exclusive" apps still are and still launch that
way. Google services have always been different story. Just like Gmail before
it and Maps before that, Google has no problem acting fair and while slowly
and deliberately widening the gap between their private API and their public
one.

Recently it bit them in the ass and they lost iOS mapping which brings in
plenty of real advertising revenue. I'm not sure doing it again with your core
business, search, is such a great idea.

It's worth keeping in mind who is really being hit by karma here. When Google
shafts iOS like that, it cost them more money than anyone else. It really is
cutting off your nose to spite your face.

~~~
yohui
I'm not sure I understand your response to zalew.

You have an issue with how Google's private APIs are better than their public
APIs, and argue that ultimately this hurts Google most, right?

While that's a fine point, what does this have to do with how Google has
released its _own_ apps on iOS before Android in the past?

EDIT: The iOS Maps controversy aside, I'm also not sure why Google Translate
getting an update on Android would impact Google's "core business" of search.

~~~
shinratdr
Because iOS first makes sense from a financial standpoint. Android first just
spites iOS at the overall expense of Google. The Maps API thing was just an
example of how they pushed it too far.

My point being, it's fun to go Ha! at the "other side" and all but let's not
lose sight of the bigger picture. iOS users have had plenty of reason to be
smug because they made companies more money than Android, and that includes
Google. It's easy to look at this and other Google apps and assume that it's
the Android user's turn to be smug and the tables are turning, but I would
very much argue that they are not.

I guess what I'm saying is, I wouldn't bother reading too much into this. The
status quo in mobile is that way for a reason and that reason hasn't changed:
money

I'm additionally arguing why this is a dumb decision, because I want to and
not because its actually related to the parent comment.

As for your edit, I personally hold translate pretty close to search. If I'm
bothering to translate something, it's usually something I want to search or
just searched up. This feature won't by itself, my point is just that Google
should be careful when choosing to widen the gap because it could eventually
build up and bite them in the ass like it did with Maps.

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guelo
World Lens is able to do this real-time on live video. But like many startups
the big boy's "everything is free" philosophy is going to hurt their business
model.

~~~
mootothemax
_World Lens is able to do this real-time on live video._

Not for Polish, they're not. They also sadly don't support my beaten-up old
ZTE Blade. Google translate has them beaten for both.

Edit: regarding the "everything is free" philosophy, I would glady pay for
Word Lens. If it ran on my phone. And supported Polish. Neither of which I see
as being terribly likely in the future. _goes on rant about how much I'd pay
for a Polish lexicon in a format I can run some fun statistics against_

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Kartificial
Have been playing around with this feature and notice that there is a clear
boundary when it comes to performance. It comes down to the size of the
letters. If you scan a lot of letters it does recognize the words, but the
letter recognition turns out to be poor. As soon as you zoom in a bit the
performance will improve drastically.

All in all, neat feature :)

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zhuzhuor
Youdao dictionary Android app has the similar function to translate the word
in live camera long time ago.

You can check the last screenshot in the app page
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.youdao.dic...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.youdao.dict&hl=en)

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mitjak
I'd actually recommend the salmon just below the ham on the menu ;)

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c0nsumer
This is one reason why I wish the Nexus 7 had a rear-facing camera.

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zalew
it's wifi only, so it would be useless anyway in most travels.

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barista
Wow. Didn't know Google translate didn't have this feature until now. That is
something Bing on Windows phone could do for almost a year now...

Nice feature. Useful if you travel a lot.

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mtgx
I think the functionality was available in Google Goggles before.

