Use your BlackBerry as a language translator with Photo Translator

There are some apps that I just have to get. They might not be pertinent to my interests, but they pique my curiosity because they offer functions I haven’t yet seen. The idea of language translation via snapshot isn’t exactly new, but when I saw an app in our Store this morning I had to download it and give it a go. I can report back that the thing works wonderfully. If you need quick translation services, you might want to nab this app. There’s really not much to the app, which means it’s easy to use. Just click on the first icon, which brings up a few options. You’re asked to choose which language you’re translating to and from, but you’ll get that prompt again towards the end. Then Photo Translator will show you a few tips for picture taking. Once you click OK, your camera will pop up. Make sure you have auto-focus enabled and the flash off. Snap your picture, and you’re basically done. From there the app confirms the photo, scans it and presents it as text, and then translates. You can save the translation to memo, so it’ll be around if you need it later. That also gives it a second purpose: you can scan in text from a book so that you have it in digital format, rather than on the printed page. You don’t even need the translate feature for that. I can imagine this working well at a foreign restaurant where the menu is not in English. I have a few places near me that have menus in Spanish, and neither my girlfriend nor I speaks a lick of it. Using this app will certainly help us when browsing the menu. The only downside I can see is that it doesn’t do too well with capturing computer screens. I have a 21 inch screen and I pumped up the font size, but it still returned random characters. Maybe it’s a lighting thing. I don’t know. But the app works brilliantly on the printed page. You can get Photo Translator for $4.99. It works with BlackBerry models running 4.6 through 6.0, and translates to and from over a dozen languages, including English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Czech, Dutch, Greek, Chinese Traditional, Chinese Simplified, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, Croatian, Hebrew, and even Swahili.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.