iPhone for Translations

[Tony Galiani]

This was new to me so sharing in case I am not the only who was not aware of this iPhone feature.

 

From the New York Times this past Saturday:

Copy or translate text with the camera. Open the camera app and point your phone lens at a block of text. An icon with three lines in an outlined square appears at the bottom-right corner. Tap the icon, and it captures the text with the option to copy, select all, look up, translate, or share.

 

I tried it on a Nimo5 video description and it worked okay.  Not sure how it compares to translation apps but it seems pretty handy.  Hoping I am not the last person in the Forum to learn about this!

 

Ciao,

Tony

[kuro68000]

Google Translate is rather useful. There is a lot more you can do with it, at least on Android.

 

You can use it for real-time translation of two people talking. If you press the conversation icon it does everything else automatically, detecting when one person stops or switches languages automatically.

 

On Android you can use it in Google Lens or whatever it is called these days. It varies from phone to phone, but on Pixel you hold down on the nav bar at the bottom of the screen and then tap the translate icon. It will translate whatever is on screen, and it works with images, in apps, everything. Very handy for Japanese only apps.

 

It can also do real-time transcription of phone calls with translation, and the same for videos on YouTube etc.

 

On Android to use the photo translate feature, open Google Translate and tap on the camera icon. It does it in real-time, or you can tap the shutter button to freeze it. You can also use it in the Google Photos. They can both handle hand-writing, which to me is deeply impressive because even I can barely read mine.

[cteno4]

I think this came in in the iOS 16. Sorta hidden feature. Handy for something fast. The app works well as well, pretty much the same as google translate app. You can download Japanese to the device in the apps so you don’t have the lag to it being sent out for processing. It’s pretty quick and easy. I like the app using the live view. Only downside is on the phone the translated text can be small if you are doing smaller text (translated text is the same relative sizes as the Japanese test is in). Comes up bigger on the iPad for when I’m doing modeling stuff. Definitely matured a lot in the last couple of years. I’m more tempted now sometimes of snapping a pict of a instruction sheet diagram with an important bit of info and printing it to shove in with the instructions for the figure now.

 

another translation thing I’ve been meaning to do is to print out the English version of the hobbysearch description text for many of my trains, especially for painted trains that have interesting stories, and shove the in the train case.. My dyslexic mind has a hard time keeping details about trains unless there is some sort of connection to other bits, especially locations and lines, those just do not stick in my dyslexic brains (taxonomy killed me in school, at least anatomy was pretty logical in structure and prefix and suffix and I could think my way thru from what bits I could remember). 
 

jeff

[kuro68000]

For small text, in the Google Translate app if you press the shutter button you can then pinch to zoom as usual.

 

For actually photographing the small text, a phone with macro mode helps.

 

You have to download Japanese and English to your device to use the image translation feature anyway, but additionally on Pixel phones the voice recognition is done locally as well, so it's very responsive. My wife's iPhone lags a lot, but my Pixel doesn't. Actually her iPhone rarely seems to understand what she is saying anyway, for some reason the microphone on the Pixel seems to be a lot better.

[cteno4]

Yeah it’s just a pain to enlarge in my smaller iPhone so I  just use the iPad.

 

iOS will let you do their translate without the download just a second or two lag while it sends it off to Apple to translate. Pretty sure Google translate iOS app was like that as well and I just downloaded there too to make it faster.

 

ive not tried the audio translation yet.

 

jeff

[babidi]

I don't have an iPhone,, but on Android, it's pretty useful time to time.