PhotoTranslator is a neat application for Nokia N900. It allows you to translate text from pictures to various languages.
Imagine yourself walking on a street somewhere in a foreign country and you face a warning sign, but you have no idea what it says. Just take a picture of the sign and open it with PhotoTranslator, crop the text in the sign and PhotoTranslator translates the text to your language. In addition the PhotoTranslator can be used also for translating copy/pasted or typed text, not just for text from pictures.
The PhotoTranslator project started as a technology study for Nokia N900: how easy would it be to make useful software with some actual purpose for N900 using Qt? I found it to be very easy indeed. Although Qt 4.6 for N900 was far from being ready (at December 2009) it still provided me the necessary tools for creating working Hildon-like software without too much extra work. At that point the Hildon-looks on UI needed some N900 specific Qt code which means that using the same UI code directly on other platforms is not possible. However the code can be modified to be cross-platform quite easily.
What happens under the hood?
PhotoTranslator deploys two Google APIs. For parsing text from pictures I used Google’s tesseract-ocr (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) library that is installed as binary to N900 with PhotoTranslator. For translating the text to other languages I used Google’s Language API (http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/) which obviously is used through HTML queries. So basically what I did was just that I glued these two APIs work together and wrapped them into nice UI for which Qt is a very powerful tool.
Here is a little demo of the PhotoTranslator in action:
15 Comments
Looks interesting! I could find a use for it abroad.
Any Idea when you guys are thinking of releasing this
?
If you want some more language pairs, Apertium has a Google Translate-compatible API:
http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-service#Consuming_the_service
@Clinton Jef
We are working on releasing the PhotoTranslator. There are couple of issues that we need to solve first. We will add information about the release here at CybercomChannel.
Can we just “read” the text with this program without translating and using internet? to copy and paste somewhere for example..
As someone with an eclectic taste in food as I do this app would be extremely useful. I’ll be keeping an eye out for it.
Brilliant – can’t wait for this app, would come in really handy
@k
Thanks for the tip. We will consider adding Apertium API to PhotoTranslator.
@Zelim
The text from the image and the translated text are both in editable text areas and can be copy/pasted.
PhotoTranslator first parses the text from the image and displays it. After that PhotoTranslator always tries to translate the parsed text using Internet. Currently only way to disable the translation is to disconnect Internet connection. Or to be quick and tap Cancel when translation begins.
Hey, any idea when you’ll be able to make this available to try? it looks really cool.
You indicated in one of the comments you were having some packaging problems, I’m sure there are plenty of people that would help if that’s still an issue.
where is it? i want it! why not release a beta? what is the hold up? its been a month almost since we’ve heard anything about it. why even put out a vid and start all this hype if youre not going to put it out yet?
Great app, i so need it here in Tokyo. Any chance of seing it on a Symbian platform?
@Robbie, we are finalizing the alpha package of phototranslator atm. Hopefully we can provide a package for testing this week.
The package size will be quite huge because the number of languages. Later we have plans to provide each language as an own package so that you can install what ever language you want for phototranslator.
Really cool and useful application, I can barely wait for it’s release. I work and live in a German speaking country and my German is not so good (I’m learning but hey it’s German
). I could really use such an app, Hope you guys will release soon 
Great work,
Cheers,
C
Any update the release date? I’m going abroad and would like ro take this app on an extensive field test to china…
@Uli Tokyo Good question. We need to think what it would require from our side to make it work on Symbian.
@Cosmin & @b.IT Alpha version is already there in extras devel repository. I’m gonna write a little article about that and publish it tomorrow. But remember, that it’s alpha, so use it at your own risk.