I've been using WorldLens [0] for several weeks and while it has an inferior UI and its translation engine is outright dumb, it works offline and it's a HUGE plus. One needs this sort of app when traveling in another country, so the chances of having WiFi/3G connection are pretty slim, so no Google translation for you.

That's not to say that's Google's take is wrong, it's just (far) less practical right now.

[0] http://questvisual.com

"One needs this sort of app when traveling in another country, so the chances of having WiFi/3G connection are pretty slim"

THIS is what needs fixing. In Asia, it's often cost-effective to get a Sim on the spot (I got one in Kuala Lumpur just for a two-day stay). Usually though it's not worth getting a local Sim unless you're there for at least 4 or 5 days and that's assuming they don't insist on residency like they sometimes do.

I'm from the UK and in many European countries I can just use my own Sim without it being completely prohibitively expensive (although it's still a complete rip-off).

But we need decently, priced roaming data or quick-to-buy local SIM cards in every country so that all those maps, translators, local guides and other marvellous aids to travelling can actually get used.

Perhaps more for the tinkerers and enthusiasts, but https://github.com/arinkverma/Apertiurm-Androind-app-devlopm... (yes, it's misspelt twice) runs the full Apertium translator offline on your Android device. Apertium is more aimed towards post-editing (for publication) of translation between closely-related language pairs (rather than gisting/translation-for-understanding), but lately there have been some more distant language pairs which would be useful in a phone app.

Actually windows phone has a really good app for visual translations which also includes speech to speech. It is designed to work offline too.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/17/microsoft-updates-bing-tr...

funny they gave cyrilic as an example. I've recently been on Ukraine and wanted to test it out for fun. scanned part of a menu (capital letters) while in a restaurant with wifi and the result was something like "3KOUIJL3KLJLKOOOASA3IIU". even though Ukrainian!=Russian, with such scan results you can't even attempt to translate it.

btw out of curiosity I've tested a few google mobile apps while traveling. my experience:

translate - needs internet and failed reading cyrilic.

google maps - offline caching didn't work at all, I didn't know how to get to my cached maps as when I start maps it raises a message that I need internet connection and didn't let me go further.

google drive - I pressed 'offline' and wanted to create a document and it says I need internet connection. lol.

You need to tell it that the source language is Russian; if you tell it the source language is English, it will try to recognize Cyrillic characters as Roman, which doesn't work. Also, it looks like the scan option is not available for Ukrainian at all. But for something like a restaurant menu, you're probably fine telling it the language is Russian--there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages.

> there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages.

I know, and I can read cyrilic.

> You need to tell it that the source language

well, if it wasn't a bug, now I guess I faced a usability issue (using translate online it usually auto-detects the lang so I'm not used to choosing it), that's probable, and one friend of mine also told me he got gibberish from scanning cyrilic.

still one case stands: the need of a working data connection when you are travelling abroad is an obstacle.

The difference between auto guessing it online and during scanning is that it has to do one more round of guessing during OCR which is why it is more error prone.

google maps with offline cached maps works fine for me. are you on a recent version?

how do you access them? turn your phone into airplane mode and open google maps fresh. I get the loading spinner followed by a 'network failure. this aplication requires a working data connection' message .

You have to specifically save maps in advance. I think it used to be an optional labs feature but is now baked in. I believe it's activated by a long tap in the middle of the area you want to save.

You also might consider one of the apps that's uses OpenMap data to have a whole country offline.

You didn't answer my question: are you using an up-to-date version of Maps?

If you are, go the My Places> Offline to see your maps.

WFM in airplane mode.

yes, up to date.

Okay... version?

I need you to respond to the other part of my question:

> If you are, go the My Places> Offline to see your maps.

You need to describe what you see, what you are doing, and what happens.

if I'm online - yes, it works perfectly. but I don't need them offline when I'm online.

I described what happens when I'm offline - error, you need data connection. that's it. v6.12.0, play says it's up to date.

and did you cache maps before going offline?

Microsoft’s app Translator is really good. You can even download language packs so that it works offline.

It's a basic feature, and perhaps it's not perfect, but for those that use this app quite a bit, this is a huge help.

Worst case, it doesn't recognize the text, and you type it in, same as you had been doing this whole time.

Blog post from Aug 9, 2012, so "old news".

Something that's new to you is old news to people following the space.

For now, it supports only few languages. That's sad.

i've been wondering what the photos in recaptcha were doing for a while. I guess we now have our answer. congrats i guess?

Recaptcha does not work for this, because it needs to give a fast response to the user. Recaptcha is useful for batch processes and to generate data that refines their statistical models, but not for real-time OCR.

The photos in recaptcha are mostly street names and numbers from Google StreetView. Very elegant combination of two ambitious projects.

I wish they just bought Word Lens or did something similar. Using the 3G connection is the last thing you want to do when you're travelling.

Word lens and google translate are incompatible.

The only real feature aside from basic OCR that Word Lens offers is that they make the "translation" appear in the same area where the original words were.

This only works because they only translate words, they don't translate what is actually being said.

If word lens were to attempt to do any actual translation, the amount of text would be greatly different, and the gimmickyness of their product would vanish.

Google translate wants to actually translate one thing from another. Word lens wants to translate individual words to help you get a basic idea of what something might say, which preserving it's futuristic gimmick.

I think Google could do something similar to what they did to Voice recognition in Jelly Bean. They managed to make 80% of their voice engine work offline. If they can do that with voice, I think they can do that with their dictionaries.

>If they can do that with voice, I think they can do that with their dictionaries.

This feature uploads images to Google to do the OCR. That's the biggest problem here.