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Comment by darren_ | Hacker News Reader

Depending on how their OCR works, Mandarin/Japanese->English(/spanish/&c) could be a _lot_ more difficult (thousands of characters to distinguish) and in the case of Japanese the translation a lot trickier (completely different grammar, Mandarin's not so bad though).

This could just be a case of needing to optimize and train their recognizer to deal with a much larger set of possible characters, or it could require implementing kanji-specific OCR techniques like attempting to decompose the characters into their constituent strokes, and recognize based on classification of those strokes (orientation, position, direction).

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I would have absolutely no problem reading Japanese or Chinese if it just did a word-for-word translation, romanized all the particles, and expected me to know what they meant (or had a handy feature that explained them when the image was paused). Even so far from actual translation, this would still pass for one of the best things ever.

Of course, guessing the correct word when performing word-for-word translation of hanzi is almost impossible, so even the extremely primitive product I'm thinking of is very difficult.

This is what I was thinking. I don't know about Japanese, but sentence structure in mandarin is pretty much reversed from what it is in romance languages. And so much of character meaning is based on context that outside of common phrases it might be nearly impossible.

On the other hand, an English to Chinese translator might be more doable, and might also be more commercially profitable.

Even an app that converted characters into the most direct meaning could provide insight in a large number of cases into the intended meaning and would be valuable.

An app that converted from characters to pinyin (a much easier problem) would be gold to someone trying to learn mandarin. I'd easily pay $50 for something with that functionality without it even making an attempt at the english. It's a much smaller market than those trying to understand chinese signs on a vacation, but it's one with a much larger stake and interest in the result.

The Chinese dictionary app Pleco has an OCR plugin.

Here's a video demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc

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