So it would appear that cell phones can pretty much do anything now. They’ll cook you breakfast, comment on your new tattoo, launch a missile, maybe even make a phone call. But that’s not all.
Coming at us from somewhere in The Future is Word Lens, an app developed by Quest Visual for your iPhone that will translate, instantly, text from another language onto your screen. No Internet connection needed. You point your phone at the sign or whatever it is, and you’ll see the language of your choice displayed.
There are some limitations, of course. It doesn’t work on great big blocks of text; you couldn’t read a novel with it, but you might be able to get through a short passage. It doesn’t work on fancy fonts, either; you need clear text and bright light to get it to function properly. And they’ve only got Spanish to English and English to Spanish, but they’re working on the next version and adding new languages.
Still, for a first go, it’s pretty impressive. We’re one step closer to dissolving some language barriers. And it’s so much easier than flipping through a phrasebook and blurting out that you want to caress a turkey when all you were asking was to find the bathroom.
To see it in action, check out the video here, and for some more explanation by one of the developers, there’s this video here.
Comments
Mike
April 12th, 2011 - 10:24:06 AM
There's no need to download any program. Just open Safari and go to http://www.mobile-translator.net/ to translate any text.
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