German is the most predominant of the four national languages of Switzerland. Its tough for one to manage with English in this country, since all sign boards, products and even tourist information is only in German. During my travel to the western and southern parts of Switzerland, a similar clear dominance of French and Italian, respectively was felt.
Having tried out few German translation apps, I setup Google Translate. While I was expecting a basic functionality to transliterate, it was mind-blowing to see that you could point your mobile camera at some text and Google would translate this into English. Reading a big board or a long sentence effectively meant just scanning the text, and reading off your mobile in your native language!
At first sight this looked uber cool and straight out of a science fiction movie. At play in the background were Google's separate technologies of 1) image scanning & text detection, 2) language identification and 3) translation, all neatly strung together to give a great experience. I've been wildly experimenting and giving this feature a ride over the past week.
Google Translate met its match when I tried this last week on a sign-board at the Drachenfels castle in Bonn, Germany. More on the picture-perfect 'Disney' castle in a later post. Below is a comparison of the actual sign in German, and what Google translated it to, for me (expletives alert)!
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| The original text | ..and Google's translation! |
In summary, as expected of a first-generation version of an innovative idea, this has limitations, well severe limitations. However, its quite handy to get a rough idea of what some text is about, and that too in a convenient way by whipping out your mobile and pointing it at stuff. I will continue to use this and also the equally cool audio-translation feature, hoping this will get better, and not get abruptly killed by Google!
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