iPhone Life magazine

Babelshot — take photo of foreign-language text, and iPhone translates it

I'm amazed by all the creative uses developers are finding for the iPhone camera. One of the latest is the just-released Babelshot. If you're in a situation where you have a bit of text in a foreign language that you need to translate, such as a restaurant menu, you can simply take a photo of the item, select the portion of the text you want to translate, and Babelshot does the rest. It supports automatic translation between 32 languages. You don't need to do any typing or anything. Babelshot only works for small amounts of text. You can also optionally enter in text manually. The app is $1.99. It apparently only recognizes the Roman alphabet, so the camera feature won't work with, say, Chinese or Arabic text. In that case, you'll have to enter the text manually. 

 

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Jim Karpen's picture

Jim Karpen holds a Ph.D. in literature and writing, and has a love of gizmos. His doctoral dissertation focused on the revolutionary consequences of digital technologies and anticipated some of the developments taking place in the industry today. Jim has been writing about the Internet and technology since 1994 and has been using Apple's visionary products for decades.

Old Comments

will it go the other way

will it go the other way around? that would be great!

No

Not sure what you mean. Enter English and have it translate to a foreign language? 

Nice

Guess the developer decided to jump on the publicity and raise the price to $4.  I would have bought it for $2 since that's what he was selling it for and sold it for to the others that commented.  Oh well.  Greed is a bitch and you lost my sale.

Confused

I'm missing something obviously. If a sign is in Chinese or Arabic, how would I enter it manually on the iPhone for translation? Is there a keyboard layout available to enter those characters?