I really don't like things trying to be other things. My phone is a phone. It's not a Japanese translation service powered by the camera on it. Kinda begs the question why I'm in a Japanese restaurant when I can't read.. how did I even know it was a restaurant?

Maybe I can offer a development to the service tho, if you see someone on the street you quite fancy, you can take a picture of them on your cameraphone, it can connect to various social network sites and tell you where they live so you can stalk them using GPS.

Really I shouldn't give these people ideas should I?

Wonder how long it will be before someone actually sues a mobile phone for cybercrime.

"However, the processing required to work out what you just snapped an image of will apparently be done on your network provider’s servers."

In other words this will cost you, even though given mobile storage options nowadays, it needn't...

This will be handy if you spot someone wearing a t-shirt with Japanese characters on it; you can use the phone to translate the characters, and find out if they really say SUPER IDIOT or TOWER OF NAPPIES or FULL FART etc.

Or maybe even check that their tattoos dont say "steak and chips - £7"!!

Another pointless addition to the 'services' provided by mobile phone operators. When will then learn that all we want mobiles for is to, well, communicate with each other?

Having said that, the translation part looks good, even if it is simply a camera, OCR and Babelfish cunningly tied together.

The shopping thing though... every shopping/advertising 'value added' service that the providers have attempted have failed miserably. I don't know why they keep trying.

"Kinda begs the question why I'm in a Japanese restaurant when I can't read.. how did I even know it was a restaurant?"

Having been to Japan, and having been to *several* restaurants where neither I nor any of my friends could really understand the menu (despite one member of our party who supposedly knew Japanese), this would have been immensely useful to us. Instead we had to point at pictures and fumble around with phrase books.

And you would know it is a restaurant because, oh I don't know... Perhaps all of the food being cooked and served in exchange for money? Or maybe, and this might require a leap of faith, you used your Nokia phone to translate the sign outside the place?

Dumb ass...

One of the things that isn't common info about going to HK is, that unless you want to eat Subway or KFC or don't have a handy Chinese speaker handy, you aren't going to have a chance in most local restaurants, as the language on most menus is exclusively Cantonese. Then again, poring over the menu and sending clips back to the translating service isn't exactly going to endear you to most proprietors either.

April 1st?

I vaguely remember something not a million miles from this which was going to turn your mobile's camera into a 2D barcode reader and the barcodes would be everywhere, posters, magazines, you name it.

The technology was such a great success that I can't even remember anything to uniquely search for.

And now the pseudo-IPO VC-burners want their backers to believe that in the era of Web2.0, a server-based technology can do what barcodes couldn't, based on freeform text?

I doubt it very much, unless the technology is actually a farm of callcentre slaves (or distributed equivalent) who will be looking at the pictures, translating "manually", and responding accordingly. Hmm, that'll work.

Ho hum.

Surely as English speakers, we don't need this, we just have to keep shouting in English until they get the idea? :P

While I was on business in Hong Kong and Tokyo on business, I rented phones with cameras built in so I could take pictures of things on menus and at the grocery store. I would email the picture to a co-worker in the local office who would call/mail me back and tell me what it was in English. The scanning helps a great deal since character input by keyboard is impossible if you don't know what the character is in the first place.

Yes, there are restaurants that don't have English and the hosts speak no English whatsoever; those little hole-in-the-wall places, they never see tourists so they don't bother with English.

It would be useful in NYC as well, there are often items in French and Italian menus I don't recognize, especially when chefs get creative and add obscure ingredients. Would be great to have a translator built into something I carry with me all the time.

@Andrew

Guess you don't know anything about Japanese, or even Chinese.

There are also another 73 characters for basic Japanese called Hiragana, and another 73 characters for English based words callled Katakana. Every kid learns those 146 characters in grade school. Beyond that, there is Kanji, where there's around 2000 common characters that most adults can read. And another 8000 uncommon characters, which sometimes includes subtext in Hiragana so people can read it. You can also use Chinese characters in Japanese, so add the 6000 common Chinese characters, and 30,000 uncommon Chinese characters. There are often characters you have to guess at from the context if there is no sub-text included.

So this feature would be helpful to not only to the relatively small group of business travelers and students, but to the huge number of native Japanese and Chinese speakers.

"man, this neighborhood sure looks run down...hey, a cul-de-sac! i think we're lost...i wonder what that big sign says...

"i know, i'll use my phone to translate it! hang on...

"ok, here it is: IF YOU ARE READING THIS SIGN, I AM STANDING BEHIND YOU WITH A GUN. GIVE ME ALL YOUR MONEY, YOU <untranslatable> TOURIST!...

"crap."

TS said -

"There are also another 73 characters for basic Japanese called Hiragana, and another 73 characters for English based words callled Katakana."

You got the general idea right but a bit of an exageration - there is only 43 Hiragana and 43 Katakana characters.

This function wouldn't be so useful for native japanese, but for us gaijin it would be a godsend.

> I vaguely remember something not a million miles from this which

> was going to turn your mobile's camera into a 2D barcode reader

> and the barcodes would be everywhere, posters, magazines, you

> name it.

Eh, those are very common in Japan from what I gather. I've seen them appear on Japanese imports of arcade games. And on certain Japanese website.

My HTC TyTN supports it using a program called "QuickMark". Unfortunately, the websites presented are often total gibberish as I had not mod the TyTN to display Japanese fonts yet :oP

"I vaguely remember something not a million miles from this which was going to turn your mobile's camera into a 2D barcode reader and the barcodes would be everywhere, posters, magazines, you name it."

We have this in Japan for years, the 2D barcodes are on most things. If you take a photo of the barcode with your kaitei it will normally translate into a URL where you get more information.

"We have this in Japan for years, the 2D barcodes are on most things. If you take a photo of the barcode with your kaitei it will normally translate into a URL where you get more information."

Probably faster & easier to just give a URL.

"It would be useful in NYC as well, there are often items in French and Italian menus I don't recognize, especially when chefs get creative and add obscure ingredients. Would be great to have a translator built into something I carry with me all the time."

Na. Thats not being creative. I do speek French and Italian (not very well) but so often these things arnt worth knowing about, it is just a posh way of saying "I added some seasoning" or "I grated it"...

Just remeber that most places that do that are just being prats, trying to look like they are clever to hide avrage cooking.

It would come in very handy for me. And 2D barcode readers already exist. The N95 has one, you just have to be very still when you use it.

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (OED2) includes over 600,000 definitions

the average person degree educated person has @ 10,000 of these at their disposal

most people typcically have a day to day vocabulary of @4,000 words

your average english chav or american trailer trash typicall are limted to expresseing themsives through 400 words and infinate "grunts"

your average teenage boy expressess himself with 6 standard phrases and a single all encompassing grunt!

as for 2-D readable barcodes they are called " QR Bar Code " and are odd square patterns not the typical zebra stripes. they are quite widespread in japan for various purposes, often promotional or equivelant to a busienss card.

so what happens when with homophones, synonyms, similies or other figures of speech or colloquialisms? - any experimentation shows that direct translation between two langauges is fraught with issues with even the simplist of statements or labels!?

The N95 already has a bar-code reader - but from what I can see it's only good for those fancy 2D barcodes that direct you to more information online.

What it DOESN'T do (as far as I can tell) is read 1D EAN / UPC (whatever - been awhile since I worked on that stuff) codes that we get on everything. I would have thought that being able to scan a barcode on a product in-store and have your app find out what the product is and subsequently get either alternative online retailer info or reviews or whatever would be a no-brainer! Obviously not.

Instead they think that I want to take a photo of a t-shirt and have the computer help me figure out where to buy it is a good idea...

I'm still utterly convinced that there's a big fat marketing strategy standing between us and a phone that is really, supremely, useful. We've had the tech for ages but vendors seem really resistant to putting all the pieces together.