ABBYY Fototranslate aims to turn your phone's camera into an instant translator. It is an almost magical concept - point the camera at some text and have it translated into English. Find out how well it performs in our review.
When we first saw this app we had visions of a universal translator, something we could take on holiday and point at restaurants, street signs and even newspapers to get an instant translation. As it stands, we think our holiday would probably be over before we got the results we were after.
ABBYY Fototranslate is a bit of a headscratcher. It is not that the app doesn't do what it claims - it does, pretty much - but why it does it in the way that it does that is causing us to furrow our brows.
Fototranslate uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to capture pictures of text using the camera and turn it into actual text characters that can be passed to the translation software. You simply start the app and line up an onscreen line with the text you are trying to translate, then tap the camera icon at the bottom of the screen.
This is more difficult than it sounds - the autofocus isn't great and the app will moan if the image isn't crisp enough. It often took us a couple of tries to get an acceptable image. Also, Fototranslate has a real problem with skewed images. If letters aren't lined up exactly horizontal they will often be ignored.
Worse, the app can only handle one word at a time. Yes, our dream of instantly translating a full menu was going to stay just that. You can tap individual words to get a (near instant) translation, but the app can't translate phrases or blocks of text.
This is baffling - particularly when you look at ABBYY's other OCR apps like the excellent Business Card Reader, which handles such problems with ease. Nokia's freebie Multiscanner app could do OCR translation to much better effect, despite being just a beta.
We do have to commend ABBYY on being able to translate Russian text and the app is useful for handling 'problem' words if you can read a little of a language (and for street signs) but we think ABBYY could have out a bit more work in to make this a lot more useful.
Details
Price:€ 24,95
Size: 225 MB
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