Google Translate for Android added this Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature today, which was available previously in Google Goggles.
"With Google Translate you can:
• Translate text between 64 languages
• Translate by speaking the text instead of typing it (17 languages)
• Use camera to take a picture and brush text to translate (available on Android 2.3 and above).
• Listen to your translations spoken aloud (40 languages)
• Communicate with another person using speech-to-speech translation in Conversation Mode (ALPHA, 14 languages)
• Display translations in full screen mode to make it easier for others nearby to read
• Star your favorite translations for quick access even when you’re offline
• Access your translation history even when you’re offline
• Spell out the translation of non-Latin script languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, etc..) in Latin characters to read it phonetically (e.g. Pinyin, Romaji)
• View additional dictionary results for single words or short phrases
• Push the handwriting button and simply write what you want to translate
Translations between the following languages are supported:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish"
To use this feature, click the Camera icon and focus on the words you want to translate. Once you take the picture, brush the letters you want to translate as shown above in the first picture. Google Translate then translates to the language you choose. You can either read or listen to the translated text.
This will be great tool to have when visiting foreign countries and translate texts instantly.
Previously, I used Word Lens app, which does this OCR and translate languages instantly, but Word Lens costs $4.99 or more for each language. Compared to Word Lens, Google Translate does a whole lot more, with more features, more languages option plus it is free. This is another must have app for Android.
The above feature is not available in iPad or iOS, but I am sure Google will make them available soon.
Here is a video in Vietnamese language but you can see how Google Translate works with the OCR feature.
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