Google Translate

Out of all the items in my house that are written in foreign languages, I had two readily accessible. After updating Google Translate, I found an instruction manual for a pair of headphones that I had bought a few months ago, which was predominantly in Chinese. I changed the translation to Chinese->English, clicked the camera icon and pointed it at the booklet. I should note here that to take a screenshot with my phone while using the Translate app was extremely difficult, as in order to take a screenshot I had to block my view of what was being translated and blindly tap the screenshot icon.

As you can see in the first screenshot, Google was able to translate some of it almost instantly, but it still wasn’t all too accurate. The Chinese texts appears blurry and only every other couple words are translated. This isn’t really useful, so I let the camera focus more and gave Translate a few more seconds to do its job. The result is the second screenshot. It had translated a lot more of the overall text and to me at least, it seems correct. I often buy things from China and when messaging back and forth about products, even when typing in English the message looks similar to what was translated. “Even pick success after you can listen to music or call” is a good example which would basically mean “After successfully pairing you can listen to music or make calls”.  Maybe it’s just really difficult to translate because they likely have different sentence structures and grammatical rules (I don’t know any Chinese). It’s not the most effective for this but overall, even the nonsensical parts of the translation could be inferred by what’s written around it.

I then tried to do the in-app picture with the booklet. Instead of highlighting specific text in the picture for it to translate, I selected the “Select All” option. I thought it would be more accurate than the “Instant Translation” mode because it could take it’s time to figure out the most accurate translation before displaying it to me and oh, what a gem it gave me! The third screenshot shows the totally nonsensical “have a succession of sacred sacred sarced sacred beaches” which has nothing to do with headphones unless you’re listening to music on a sacred beach. Trying it again and getting similar results I’m going to say this method of translation is very ineffective.

Then I took some Mexican cheese out of my fridge, swapped translate to Spanish->English and tried to obtain a picture of that. The final screenshot shows the picture in which I had manually highlighted all of those text boxes and… it translated almost all of it correctly! As you can see at the top it starts the recipe off with Ingredients: 2 tablespoons unsalted butter. Looking at the English portion, that’s spot on. For common terms that are widely used, and the most translated, it is very effective!

Google Translate isn’t perfect with its translations yet. But it’s usable for most cases. It’s not something you would use to translate a foreign newspaper but for shopping at a foreign market or when travelling abroad in general it’s quite effective. I buy a lot of stuff from China. I mean I must account for like a quarter of their exports. Most of their booklets (like in screenshots one and two) included with their products have English and Chinese instructions, but some are Chinese only. I use Google Translate for this purpose and like I said, it’s not perfect, but usable. I think it’s very beneficial to have automatic translation. I can’t really think of a scenario where automatic translation wouldn’t be beneficial. Walking through a foreign market with sunglasses that have built in auto translation would allow people to be more confident that the round red thing they’re looking at is what they think it is. Driving in a foreign country with auto translating sunglasses would allow any driver to know what each and every road sign says, without having to translate it manually, causing them to overlook exits, speed limits, or road safety notices. Touring a museum without English signs would allow an English-speaking person to tour it without a guide. The potential applications are endless. I think the user though should be able to set the languages to translate to and from. A multilingual person may want the signs in one country translated to English and signs in another country translated to Finnish. That same person may get annoyed with it translating Finnish road signs to English when they know Finnish better.