Google’s free multilingual machine translation service, Translate, now enables you to simply point your camera at boards, menus and other such things which contain Japanese word in print and have it translated in English in a whisker, or vice versa.
They could previously translate a photographed Japanese text into English, but with their latest project, a simple point of camera would do the trick. The features are now available for both Android and iOS versions of Google Translate via Word Lens.
Google Translate is one of the most useful and widely used translation tools around. Apart from the fact that it is free, it is also pretty accurate and Google’s vast trove of machine learning and data tools means that the service is likely to get better with time. As such even Japanese, which is considered to be one of the toughest language around, isn’t beyond the horizon.
This feature may appear unimportant at the surface, but it has been observed that people who have spent a considerable amount of their life in Japan often find difficulties in understanding signs and product names in English. English is the most commonly used language in the world, and the people who are not acquainted to Japanese also face the same problems in Japan. The translate service will be very helpful to such people.
Word Lens is an augmented reality translation app which was created by Quest Visual, which was latter acquired by Google in 2014, for making features directly for Translate. Back in January 2015, when it was launched on Translate, it only supported English to Spanish translations, and vice versa. However, Google is now planing to shift to AI motorized translations for the Google Translate for the sake of providing better speed and accuracy. The results can be revolutionary and a lot of new translation pairs may appear into picture as well.
