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Unlost in Translation With DoCoMo and Android

Sep 20, ’11 11:42 PM
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Remember that scene in Lost In Translation where Bill Murray randomly orders food from a menu he’s at loss understanding?

DoCoMo is making this a thing of the past.

The Japanese telco giant has released an Android app that translates restaurants menus on the fly: 料理メニュー翻訳. Japanese, English, Korean and Chinese.

You just have to take a photo with the camera and the text gets translated in less than a fifth of a second.

This reminds me a bit of WordLens, the iPhone app that grabbed some headlines at the end of last year. It allows live translations of text through the Google Translate API (video). But maybe because that API is being deprecated, the app never went further than English to Spanish and reverse.

DoCoMo probably uses its own custom set of translation technologies, maybe based on the same roots than the simultaneous interpretation system that it displayed this spring at Wireless Japan 2011 —I mean, just look at this video, that was quite impressive.

The Android app can be downloaded for free, but only on 2.1+ systems. Its use will remain free of charge until mid-January, during which time the company will use consumers’ feedback to iterate it.

DoCoMo is already working on expanding the thesaurus besides restaurant menus.

Well…「そのためのアプリケーションがあります」

 

Update: For our foreign friends, DoCoMo notes that a subscriber account is needed —i.e. a DoCoMo SIM card inserted in the compatible phone. It might well just be a case of not offering support if you’re roaming from your national carrier. Starting January 2012 though, you might be locked out by not having the possibility to pay for the service (thanks to my fellow Pietro Zuco for the help understanding the small prints). Don’t hesitate to share your experiences in the comments below.

  • shonangreg

    I have an Xperia X10 (so-01b) here in Japan running android 2.1, and I could not find this app in the market from my phone searching for docomo, nttdocomo, or even メニュー (that is “menu” written in katakana). I had to enter the whole name in Japanese to even find it: 料理メニュー翻訳 (Ryouri menyu- honnyaku).

  • http://paulpapadimitriou.com Paul Papadimitriou

    Does it work as advertised?

  • http://paulpapadimitriou.com Paul Papadimitriou

    Does it work as advertised?

  • shonangreg

    Oh, yeah, but it is a very small window that takes in the text to be OCR’ed, and its dictionary seems limited to food-related things. Someone who doesn’t read Japanese at all could use this to scan a menu, one item at a time, and do reasonably well — as long as the text is not too small. My Xperia wouldn’t find the focus on the close shots needed for small text.

    Something with a bigger window capable of translating more than a few words at a time would be much better. The app in question is nothing like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs

  • shonangreg

    Oh, yeah, but it is a very small window that takes in the text to be OCR’ed, and its dictionary seems limited to food-related things. Someone who doesn’t read Japanese at all could use this to scan a menu, one item at a time, and do reasonably well — as long as the text is not too small. My Xperia wouldn’t find the focus on the close shots needed for small text.

    Something with a bigger window capable of translating more than a few words at a time would be much better. The app in question is nothing like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2OfQdYrHRs

  • http://paulpapadimitriou.com Paul Papadimitriou

    Yeah, that’s the video I had linked too. That was impressive stuff.

    Thanks for telling me it works, some people were in doubt the app could do Japanese to English (they thought it only did English to Japanese).

  • shonangreg

    Oh, it has does traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean, and English to Japanese — and Japanese back to all those. Japanese has to be either the target or the source, though. It will not do Chinese to English.

    I was going to make a video for you, but working with two cameras and moving them around was more than I’m willing to do when docomo could do it much better than me. The app does show its reconstruction of the Japanese text next to the image box so you can check the characters for accuracy, and it has the translation listed as well.

    The image here is the same as what I see:
    https://market.android.com/details?id=jp.co.nttdocomo.menutranslator
    The blue text is English, though.

    Here is another one:
    http://balloon.sakura.ne.jp/sblo_files/shenzhen/image/Blog_F1001045.JPG

  • Mirdreams

    I just downloaded this in the USA on a Verizon Droid (original) running Froyo and got it to run fine.  Not a lot of Japanese to test it on in the house but it read “Oriental” just fine off a package of udon I had.  Very cool app, thanks for posting.