ABBYY FotoTranslate

The application was recently mentioned somewhere in the news, and I really liked the idea to mix FineReader OCR system with Lingvo dictionaries and make it mobile, so that you can take pictures on our way and check what the words on the pictures mean. If you’re travelling and not speaking languages well enough, it may help you get your bearings in some situations. I recalled that a year ago I had to park a car in the streets of Vienna and as my German was quite poor I really could not understand what all different parking signs say. What I did was sending SMS with the sign text to a friend of mine who spoke German and she translated. What I did when I came back home was taking a course of German :)

However, FotoTranslate also has quite serious limitations:

• it works only on Symbian (i.e. Nokia smartphones),
• translates only into Russian and
• only from English, German, French, Spanish and Italian.

First off, those languages are relatively common, quite many people speak them to some extent and many people are learning them. Secondly, you can easily get more flexibility by having Lingvo installed on your mobile phone (which is, by the way, not limited to only Symbian) and typing what you see on the sign or in a restaurant menu. Many mobile phones would allow you typing in those languages, and even if you don’t have some language-specific characters, Lingvo is “smart” enough, so you will be able to get the translation. And last, OCR technology works not good enough in some circumstances which may result into getting a wrong translation. So, translating via taking pictures seems to be fun – but it is neither faster nor more accurate. Apparently it would make much more sense with more “exotic” languages, especially those Russian people normally cannot type – e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian or Hebrew.

These were my thoughts after reading the application description. And as I have Nokia E75, I immediately downloaded and installed it and then played with it for a few minutes. My value judgments are as follows:

• I think the installation was sort of long, but this indeed may depend on the phone, its characteristics and its condition.
• It took me some time to get the camera work. While it was making quite good pictures using the built-in camera application, FotoTranslate kept saying that the camera lens may be obstructed or that the object is out of focus. Sometime later, something happened, and the camera began working normally.
• The recognition technology is pretty good, though I tried to challenge it by taking pictures of a text on the computer screen, colored glossy magazine cover and a text printed on a non-flat surface (namely on a mug).
• Dictionaries are also good enough and provide a lot of meanings of all recognized words – pretty much like Lingvo.
• I will delete the application as soon as I finish this article for the reasons mentioned above – I just don’t need it. But it may be really good and useful for certain people in certain circumstances. It can also be a real fun for children, but I don’t know any children who would have Nokia smarthpones.

Additionally, as far as I read in one of ABBYY forums, a version for iPhone is expected in August 2010.