The search service imaging devices for Android now has a new feature: “translation of a photograph” which proves to be a useful tool especially for tourists.
Google has added the support “translation” on Goggles, its service image search for smartphones with camera. Google adds Goggles, an application for visual search devices Android after its labs and unveiled in December 2009.
Goggles, software developed in Mountain View for Android smartphones that can automatically recognize image photographed by camera device was limited – so far – to recognize works of art, books or tourist attractions. With the new option, when images are photographed with a text, you can select your fingertips in the part that you want a translation : Its characters are extracted through a function of optical charter recognition(OCR) and translated automatically .
Google puts forward a concrete case: “You’re eating in Italy, you do not understand the menu and you would like more information before ordering? By scanning the menu in a foreign language, Google facilitates this operation by allowing automatic translation of text.
Among the languages supported and compatible Goggles, there are English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.
Gradually, Google plans to expand the range of languages taken into account (Latin, not Latin). Google Translate currently covers 42 languages (1722 combinations of linguistic research as possible).
The level of translation seems lofty, but is already useful as a tourist , to read the signs or, for example, menus.
Some difficulties arise in doing understand that the instrument is in the image of the text to translate, especially if there are non-standard characters or background is not uniform .
The Goggles service allows also to also translate the text in a box in Flash if photographed through a screen shot of page navigation, portion otherwise ignored by Google Translate.