Linguatec Shoot & Translate is a Java J2ME mobile application that lets you capture photos, images or pictures of any legible text in a supported foreign/international language printed on any object and translate it into one of the supported language pairs, on-the-fly, on your mobile device.

Shoot & Translate for mobile phones, combines the following language technologies:

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
Automatic translation
Voice output
Dictionary function

The software’s principle is quite simple. You just have to take a photo of any object with foreign language text with your mobile phone camera and press “Translate”. The text is extracted from the image with OCR and made available for automatic translation. The translation will appear on the mobile phone display in a few moments. The text can also be read out using the Voice Reader if desired.

The photo must have a sufficiently high quality, i.e. the text in particular should be clearly legible. Mobile phone cameras with a resolution of 1.9 mega pixels or more are generally suitable. The macro mode option is helpful for close-up pictures. The OCR conversion is done on the server with the help of a number of different OCR solutions that run concurrently. These, in combination with linguistic postprocessors developed by Linguatec, ensure optimal text recognition performance.

Depending on the language pair, Shoot & Translate has up to a million entries in the dictionary as well as the complete translation intelligence using Smart Translation technology. The SmartCorrect function can automatically correct common typos. For example, a “raost beefe snadwitch” will be correctly recognized as a roast beef sandwich.

Shoot & Translate, is available in 7 language pairs:

German -> English
German -> French
English -> French
English -> Italian
English -> Spanish
English -> Portuguese
English -> Chinese

Visit Linguatec’s homepage for more details and download links.