h a l f b a k e r y"Not baked goods, Professor; baked bads!" -- The Tick
add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random
news, help, about, links, report a problem
browse anonymously,
or get an account
and write.
register,
|
|
|
[The Alterother] is fully fluent in only one language: English (two,
I
suppose, if you consider American and Queen's separate). I'm
partially fluent in German, Franglaise, and html. I can find the
bathroom and/or pick a fight in most romance languages. All of
these
languages share the same
character set (except for the extra
letters in German, which are self-explanatory).
Let's say I'd like to translate a written word or phrase from Arabic
or Korean using an iPad or another device equipped with a touch-
screen keyboard. This app would switch the character set on my
keyboard to that of the selected 'from' language, allowing me to
hunt and peck until I can reconstruct the word I'm looking at, be
it
on a street sign in Cambodia, a restaraunt menu in Midtown
Manhattan, or the tattoo on some hipster's shoulder.
I've hunted the 'bakery and the web, and the only things I can
find
that do this are dedicated translation devices, usually ones with
physical keyboards that only work with one language. For the
purpose
of satisfying my abundant yet idle curiousity, I can no more carry
around a satchel full of these than a library of ___- to -___
dictionaries. I want an app, dammit!
PS: I couldn't work any mention of rhinoceroses
into this idea. My apologies to those who were expecting it. I'll
try harder next time.
Live Translation
http://questvisual.com/wordlens/ [MechE, Apr 18 2012]
Hieroglyphics Universal Translator
Hieroglyphics_20Universal_20Translator [theircompetitor, Apr 18 2012]
Real character
http://en.wikipedia...losophical_Language [not_morrison_rm, Apr 19 2012]
[link]
|
|
They just need to get word lens (see link) to work in more languages/with more character sets, no keyboard required. |
|
|
Yeah, it's kind of a departure from my usual fare in that
respect. This may explain the lack of rhinoceroses. |
|
|
There are OCR apps for more languages than just
those that use "Roman" alphabets. Surely they'd be
more useful than trying to determine which Hebrew
symbol you're looking at, in some wacky stylised font
that Avram & Sons have chosen for their Kosher Bagel
Bar? |
|
|
Try the Real Character, no animals were harmed in its making, but possibly a few corpses were. C link. |
|
|
"For instance, Zi identifies the Genus of beasts (mammals); Zit gives the Difference of rapacious beasts of the dog kind; Zitα gives the Species of dogs." |
|
|
OCR may be fine for you 21st Century whizbangs, but I'm
one of those Luddites whose cell phone is not smart and
has no camera, and whose iPad is Original Flavor. The only
optical device I carry around with me is an actual camera.
Shocking, I know. |
|
| |