AT MWC 2010, Google demoed a software that translates text captured by camera on cellphone. In the demo, Google engineer took a picture of a German dinner menu with an Android phone, used the new software to send the picture to Google servers and with few seconds received English translation for the menu item. The words on the image sent to Google servers were “Fruhlingssalat mit Wildkrautern” and the translation was “Spring salad with wild herbs”.

There have been softwares for text translation on mobile device, but generally the accuracy of translation has been low because of low processing power available on phone. By sending the image to Google servers for processing, Google can apply a lot more computing power, for faster, more accurate results. Google didn’t announce plans for release of the new translation software, but said that like Google Voice Search this feature will also come to Android phones first.
[Via Yahoo News]