Real Time Translation Apps
Suppose you are in Russia and you are planning to eat at a hotel. The waiter gives you a menu but the menu is in Russian and the waiter cannot speak English very well. How will you order your food? If you have an Android phone, you won’t have a problem. Software development has reached such a stage that we now have apps capable of translating foreign text into native languages.
All you have to do is start the app, point your phone’s camera at the text you want to be translated (just like how you would take a photo) and the app will do the rest. These apps work on the principle of optical character recognition. The best thing is, the apps perform this translation in real-time.
Travelers will especially benefit from such apps. For example, you are out on the road in a foreign country and you see a sign you don’t understand. If there is no one around to translate the sign for you, you can whip out the app and command it to translate the text. No more talking to strangers and putting yourself at their mercy. The apps are currently free and work best on large size text. Another good news is, all popular languages (including some relatively rare languages) are supported. So now if want a text in Afrikaans, Hindi, Russian or German translated, you know what to do.