Foreign Languages Archive

  • Google Goggles Getting OCR Translations

    Google Goggles Getting OCR Translations

    Posted on February 16, 2010 | No Comments
    In his keynote speech today at the Mobile Web Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed off what could end up being a crucial tool for anyone trying to figure out a menu in a different language or a street sign in a foreign country. Google Goggles, which creates search queries based on images instead of typed-in keywords, will soon start to be able to translate from foreign languages using Google Translate. It will do this using optical character recognition to first convert the images of letters into words it can understand, and then put those through Google translate. Schmidt showed an image of an Android phone translating "Spring salad with wild herbs and parmesan cheese wrapped in bacon" from the German. (MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak took the photo at left). Of course, Google Translate often gets the translations wrong, to humorous effect. But even a partial translation is better than nothing when you don't speak the language.

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  • Google working on smartphone software to automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue

    Google working on smartphone software to automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue

    Posted on February 7, 2010 | No Comments
    Check your calendar, friends, for the first time in a long time I was just wowed by a tech story. Google says it's working on smartphone software that would automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue. So, if you're talking to your Venezuelan pen pal, and he says, "No me gusta el fútbol americano," you can react in horror as you try to explain to him the importance of a game where more time is spent setting up plays than actually executing them is the greatest sport in the world. Porqueria.

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