211–220 of 298 posts
The walls are coming down so fast it's making my head spin - job well done! I immediately sent the link to a dozen people, about half wrote back "How much is it?" and "How do I download it?" Since QuestVisual.com is clearly going to sweep the entirety of the internets by this time next week a few friendly conversion suggestions: a) Change your button to "Try Word Lens FREE - Click Here" b) The logo under your button…
This app is too cool, but it seems a little over eager. Here's me pointing the app at a mosaic: http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg612/scaled.php?tn=0&server=...
They could have stopped at just translating and printing it on the screen, but they show it the original form, that is the difference between doing things and doing the things beautifully. I am spellbound.
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Because "dead end" means "callejon sin salida". That's the correct translation (callejon = road, sin salida = w/out exit). On the other hand, "muerto fin" has NO meaning in spanish, (and that's what you get when you translate word for word without context).
Thank you. I think context is extremely important and very difficult to get right. I remember reading one article by Google engineer where they discuss how they keep improving their analysis of search queries. E.g. [Search Term] -> [Interpretation] New York -> New York city New York Times -> The news paper New York Times Square -> Famous tourist spot in NYC. There were other examples in the article. I will try to fin…
The best examples of this, I thought, were the following passages:
Yesterday I went to the symphony. The sound was beautiful.
versus
Yesterday I went to Long Island. The sound was beautiful.
In the first passage, sound refers to an auditory experience; in the second, it refers to a body of water. Within the sentence "The sound was beautiful", there's no way to know which to use, so one must look to surrounding information to make a guess.
But I've given a short and clear example; anyone can see the right solution. But in real-life usage it's frequently unclear.
Wow. I downloaded the app, bought the Spanish -> English pack, and tried it with some simple phrases in a big TextEdit window on my monitor. It flickered a bit, but I expected that from a monitor. It got them right. Big deal, common phrases are easy -- I could just buy a phrasebook. Then I tried a random phrase from the Spanish version of "Dive into Python": Una función, como cualquier otra cosa en Python, es un obje…
I live in Montreal and you are right that you would need to understand some French but only to read signalization, some store names and public advertisement. Signalization of course is important if you are driving but an app like this won't help you (you are holding the wheel I hope). Besides that, almost any store or institution has bilingual staff (and when they don't most French speakers will understand basic Engl…
It is easy to get the hang of signage too; lots of French words are spelt almost identically in English, and the language is much easier to read than it is to listen to. You should get the hang of it quickly.
On the other hand, if you have to get any kind of job that involves speaking with customers ... you are shit out of luck.
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I think that most of the time a word-for-word translation is enough. I use Google translator a lot, and most of the time the translation is not perfect but it is good enough. So I think that is app is very useful. But I think that the real problem are the idioms and phrases, like "dead end", that have a completely different translation. On the other hand, I think that you have more processing time that 1/10 sec. Most…
Google Translate is not word-to-word though.
For example, a few years ago, some students of my wife give to her a homework about clocks and gears. When she read it, she was annoyed because the redaction was incredible horrible. But later we realized that the students didn't write it, the "homework" was a web page translated with Google Translate.
Another time, I need an example of the differences between JPEG and JPEG2K for a internal talk. I found a photograph with a zoom of Lena's eye with a legend like "JPEG2K 1% vs JPG 1%", but the webpage was in Japanese, and I can’t reed it. So I use Google Translate to be sure that it was a comparation of the two methods with the same compression level.
So Google Translate is very good to get an idea of what some web page means, but it is not good enough to make a final version of the translation.
This app have some additional difficulties that GT doesn't need to solve: they need to OCR the text in the wild, they have less computational power and they have to do it in real time. It is almost incredible that they can solve these things. With a word to word translation, I think that you can get a good enough translation 90%, 95% or even 99% of the times, but the corner cases can be really unintelligible. The translation of "Tongue Bolivian ..." is fine, and the user can understand what it means, so it is useful. The translation of "Dead End" is something that they should improve in next version.
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Yes. No Android yet but this seems worth $10 to me. I'd do Chinese first. There's a big market for that in California; many Asian families have a language gap between grandparents or parents born abroad and a younger generation born here. Basic communication is easy but things slow down fast if conversation turns to anything complex. Being able to print some words neatly by hand in English and instantly get Cantonese…
Actually, Vietnamese would work better. We have a lot more Vietnam refugees here than we do Chinese folks. If you'll notice, the three main languages you can get government papers in (at least over in San Jose, no experience elsewhere) is English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.