Today in TechiPhone app instantly translates Spanish into English
You're hungry, and you've stumbled upon a new Mexican restaurant -- but the menu is only in Spanish. So what exactly is "Tacos de camaron"? Sounds good, but what's in it? Is there shellfish involved here?
Thanks to a clever new app that can read (more or less) Spanish words and translate them — instantly — into English using the iPhone's built-in camera, you can find out in a flash whether you've just ordered a yummy beef taco (buzz, try again) or a mouthful of shrimp.
The just-released Word Lens app (free, although you'll have to pony up $5 each for the Spanish-to-English or English-to-Spanish dictionaries — and yes, more dictionaries are on the way) was two years in the making, according to TechCrunch, and it works by "reading" words captured on the iPhone's camera lens and scanning the letters using optical character recognition (or OCR), a technology that's more commonly seen in document scanning software.
Here's how it works: Just pick the dictionary you'd like to use, aim the iPhone's camera at the street sign or menu you want to translate, and hold still, as Word Lens replaces the original words with its translation, right there on the screen.
It's pretty amazing to watch Word Lens in action, and if the way in which it switches out words instantly on the screen sounds familiar, you might be thinking of similar "augmented reality" apps that have been cropping up for the iPhone and Android handsets — the ones that let you view your surroundings through a camera-assisted viewfinder, with little informational icons about nearby restaurants, shops, and subways that seem to be "floating" in the air.
Of course, Word Lens's translations aren't always perfect. I pulled up a series of Spanish-language stop signs on Flickr, only to be informed by Word Lens that "Alto" means "High" — and yes, that's right, although in the context of a big red octagonal sign at an intersection, it typically means "Stop."
That's why one of the app's most useful features lets you freeze the image and tap a translated word; the interface then flips around, giving you a series of alternative translations. Yep, there we go: "Alto" means "stop" as well as "high."
I also tried the free "reverse-word" demo -- setting it to spell words it sees backwards -- by pointing it at a regular old stop sign in English. Word Lens reversed the letters into "POTS" — useless, but entertaining nonetheless.
Word Lens fared considerably better with the Spanish-langauge menu that I found online, correctly translating "tacos de pescado" as "tacos of fish" (close enough), although fish tostada came across as "toast of fish"—correct, strictly speaking, but not quite how we usually order it.
The app also comes with a zoom mode for dealing with tiny text, while it'll also let you turn on the iPhone's flash for "reading" a menu at a candlelit table.
So, should you depend on Word Lens for getting you through your vacation to Spain, even if you don't know a lick of Spanish? Probably not. But it could come in handy in a pinch — and even better, it offers an eye-popping look at how augmented-reality apps of the future will work.
Related: Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really. [TechCrunch]
— Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.
