Pocket Translator

[VirusType2]

Companies have been tinkering with electronic pocket translators for years, but these devices generally involve a lot of typing — and a lot of griping about their limited vocabularies.
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Goggles Translate, which is available for Android phones but will ultimately be platform neutral, can "read" or visually scan words in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish and translate them into any other of those languages plus about 10 more, including Afrikaans and Albanian — with additional languages coming soon.
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recently set out to test Goggles Translate ... We went to a Puerto Rican restaurant and photographed the menu. One dish, patitas de cerdo, sounded interesting; Goggles Translate informed me that it was pigs' feet.
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That test was pretty easy, so our next target was a Spanish-language newspaper. I could fit the first paragraph or two into one photo. The translation to English was really fast; it took about five seconds. The syntax was a little off, even comical at times, but I got the gist of what was going on.
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The more we use it, the better it will get because we'll be encouraged to give feedback to engineers who make wild and crazy ideas a reality.
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Goggles Translate is arriving just ahead of the summer-travel season. The app won't turn your phone into a full-fledged tricorder, but it can at least let you order food, skim headlines and find the nearest train station without looking like a total tourist.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1987492,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

Cool technology.

 

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It works by each person holding one end of the phone. They each have a keyboard for writing in their mother tongue, which is then automatically translated into the other person's language so they can respond.

http://gizmodo.com/5530666/turn-your-iphone-into-a-double+sided-translation-machine

Also cool technology.