Word Lens:iPhone App for English to Spanish Translation

What is Word Lens?

Word lens is an iPhone app, designed by Quest Visual that can translate any printed text from English to Spanish or Spanish to English. Once you have downloaded this language translation app into your iPhone, just hold your phone camera in front of any printed text and you will see instant translation on your screen.  To get the best translating performance you need to hold your phone approximately one-hand length distance from the texts that you want to translate.

According to Quent Visual, you may not get the perfect translation always but most of the time you will be generalized meaning of the word that will help specially travelers visiting a foreign country. Unfortunately, this language translation cannot translate handwriting or any stylized fonts-it only works with font in printed form. Word lens is more or less a word-to-word translation. When you put your phone cam in front of any text, it tries to recognize the words and then search its inbuilt dictionary to find the translation to show you on screen. You can use it to translate texts in your computer screen as well and it does not need any Internet connection for translation. Word lens also has the provision of translation by typing words in the app directory of a phone.

How Word Lens Works?

Word lens has been developed based on the optical character recognition system or OCR that is around for quite a while. OCR devices are being used in industry to help people to input data at faster rate and also being used by visually impaired people as an aid to recognize characters correctly. An OCR system consists of an optical scanner, a character recognition system or character analyzer and OCR software that store the recognized data into computer memory. At first when you put an OCS device before any printed texts, the scanner scans the documents and then the scanned documents translated into electronic format. The character recognition system then analyzes this electric format of the captured texts based on their layout, fonts and texts. Once the characters are recognized from the digital file, they are sent to the OCR software for storing them in the hard disk or computer memory. Now, the stored data in computer memory is considered as an input to a language translator and that input is translated to show the user, very similar way a digital dictionary of translator works when you type a word in its interface. I f there is any voice synthesizer attached to that OCR , then user can also hear the read out of the entire document.

Cost of Word Lens

Both the form of word lens- English to Spanish and Spanish to English- costs 4.99 USD each.

Word Lens Compatible Phones

At present, it does not work with all phones. If you have iPhone 3GS, iPod touch or iPhone 4 then you can download this app from apple’s iTunes Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPod touch (4th generation). Word lens only works with iPhone must having IOS version 4 or later.

Word lens is a great example of augmented virtual reality and optical character recognition system. We can expect that in future it will add more language translation facility and will give us more comprehensive translation. Apple’s iTunes has put the translating app into their Travel app category and certainly travelers will be greatly benefited using this app by translating food menu, road directions etc. written in a foreign language.