I have never really learnt how to read Chinese, I know the how to write my name, the numbers and recognize a few words on a restaurant menu, so I’ve relied on my smartphone a lot to get by. Without the knowledge of Chinese character stroke orders, I would randomly swipe on the smartphone screen in hope that the app would recognize what I typed and then I’d copy this into a translation app. All this was changed when a few years back I chanced upon the Pleco translation app which had a built in camera function that would allow me to take photos of Chinese characters which would then get translated into English.
But this week I stumbled on the Word Lens function of the Google Translate app, this is a life changer!
Word Lens was an augmented reality translation application from Quest Visual. Word Lens used the built-in cameras on smartphones and similar devices to quickly scan and identify foreign text (such as that found in a sign or a menu), and then translate and display the words in another language on the device’s display. The words were displayed in the original context on the original background, and the translation was performed in real-time without connection to the internet. For example, using the viewfinder of a camera to show a shop sign on a smartphone’s display would result in a real-time image of the shop sign being displayed, but the words shown on the sign would be the translated words instead of the original foreign words.
This deserves 2 wows here. The first wow for what Word Lens can do and how it can improve my life so much, and the second wow for me having lived under a rock for the last 6 years since the first version of Word Lens was released……
Using Word Lens, Chinese characters are instantaneously translated into English on the camera viewfinder; its as if those Chinese characters never existed in the first place. I showed this function to Winston and he was gobsmacked. No longer will I randomly point to and order something in a traditional Chinese restaurant, only to receive an equally random dish served to me anymore. Of course, Word Lens doesn’t just work with Chinese characters, but with nearly every language under the sun that is supported by Google Translate.
