Hacker News Reader

Do you see yourselves extending this to languages based on non-Latin characters? This could be an amazing, amazing tool for Chinese characters- both for foreigners and natives.

View on HN

absolutely, though some character sets such as chinese are a few orders of magnitude more complex. stretch goal, we're working on it :)

it's funny to think about how the advantages of compact encoding influenced the progress of technology. would like to think that we're getting past this by way of Unicode, but this is an analysis problem, so character 'visual encoding' rears its head again.

of course, people are fantastically good at it, if trained in school. looking at /other/ people's scripts though, well, here we are. :)

The Pleco Chinese-English dictionary iPhone app does realtime lookups using the camera. It's more of a study tool than a realtime translation tool, but still really cool:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/24/pleco-chinese-dictionary-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com