At CeBIT last week a company called Linguatec was showing of a remarkably clever piece of software for smartphones and PDAs. Dubbed Shoot and Translate, the application works by translating text that you photograph with your handset’s camera.
All you have to do is take a picture of some text (we are guessing that street signs and menus work better than novels), let the application scan the text, and then read or listen to the translation.
You can of course enter text into the phone manually too, but then the pitfalls of spelling inaccuracies and other such linguistic frippery can cause all sorts of problems. Even so, if you happen to photograph some text that is spelt incorrectly, Shoot and Translate apparently still has a good chance of recognizing what it is supposed to say before translating it.
Very handy indeed and much more portable than one of those so called pocket Spoken (insert language here) Dictionaries. Details about the release date and handset compatibility have not been announced yet so here’s hoping Linguatec posts some on its site soon.
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