Introducing Word Lens

Thanks to Positron for forwarding this on his Twitter.

How does it compare for translating novels and does it do more than just English and Spanish?

Just downloaded this. The app is free, but you have to pay for the various translation packs. At the moment all they seem to have is English to Spanish and Spanish to English. Each pack is worth 2.99 each.

That looks awesome. Will be a huge benefit to me in my new job as a nurse in a predominantly spanish speaking community.

Though as a Spanish professor, I would LOVE if my students used it for their compositions.

It will be so sweet to see their expression when they lose half a grade for all the silly easily avoidable mistakes.

Of course, that's a problem inherent with every machine translator. The question is, does it change in real time so awesomely and is it "understandable" if not 100% correct.

I have the app and held the phone next to a caution sticker that had multiple translations. It um got a few words right. However most of what it translated just didn't make sense.

Ex: in correct in English, Caution, These glasses are not suitable sunglasses and do not protect against UV rays.

What it translated the Spanish on the package that I'll assume said the same thing: Caution: Glasses on the Sun no complete of Ray. (or something to that effect it changes constantly due to me moving the phone ever so slightly)

I'll say this, its very neat to see it try to translate in real time. I'd say give it a few months for bug fixes and what not and it might help you on your next trip to Cancun. You probably won't get it to be fluent but you might get enough bits and pieces to figure it out.

My initial reaction was "Whoa sweet!"

Then I realized it wouldn't be all that useful to me here in the states.

Now if they could make an app that allows my Spanish speaking guests to talk in their language, while my phone instantly translates to text I can read or a voice in my bluetooth I'll be stoked!

I think, even if it's not 100% accurate it gives us an approximation that can be used to help get the idea across which is perfect for those who want to travel and not learn a whole bunch of languages or carry around dictionaries.

Though I do agree that having something that provides a "good enough" translation, I can't get past the very cheap move of using incorrectly phrased Spanish cards just to make the translator look good.

Had the mistkaes been only on the app display, I'd be more forgiving. As it is, they're just playing around the quirks to make it look awesome to English speakers.

I noticed on the video it specifically said "dictionary". It looks like it's basically just translating words where they lie and not correcting for grammar. The grammatically incorrect spanish as pointed out above was just for show in the video.

It IS pretty cool though, and you can probably get the gist of what the sign is trying to say even if it's not translated to correct grammar.

But I'll wait for the Japanese or Chinese version before I buy.

I tried on a few tv manuals to see if it could translate what's on them, dang foreign instructions. It does ok enough for me to get the gist of it, but the shifting screen makes it break translation too easily and the dictionary itself has some really wrong translations of words, for instance it reads translations of the word "espanol" as "english". It'll probably be useful to me on trips so it was money worth spending. I hope they get some bug fixes and more languages soon.

That looks incredible!, I don't have an iphone but I'll be recommending it to family who have one. Do you think it would be able to handle Kanji?.

This is right up there as a christmas present along with The Manslator™.

I want japanese and korean. Because then I can read raws of my mangas/manwhas

I'll wait for the English-Klingon modules.