ABBYY FotoTranslate- Ideal Travel Companion

The holiday season may be over but if you are still planning for some travel (work/leisure), we have something you might just need for the trip. Wondering what? Let’s say you are traveling to some exotic location, the local language of which is as alien to you as the humanoids on Pandora of James Cameroon’s Avatar, then you are in for luck as ABBYY have just released another one of their revolutionary OCR based apps for 5800s- ABBYY’ FotoTranslate.

ABBYY FotoTranslate comes in as many as 8 versions as of now offering word-by-word translation between German, Italian, Russian, and English. That covers most of the European languages and if you happen to be heading to Europe, put ABBYY FotoTranslate on your shopping list, right now!

Screenshots-

The app does have a very intuitive UI and coupled with a decent OCR algorithm, it does couple up as a reliable vernacular translator for your travel needs. If you happen to spot something, of which you have no clue what it means, all you need to do is to start the app on your 5800s and point the camera at the word/phrase and voila! It reveals the meaning of the word to you, almost magically!

ABBYY FotoTranslate comes in 8 different language options and you can pick the one you need-

• Russian – English
• English – Russian
• English – Italian
• Italian – English
• English – German
• German – English
• Russian – German
• German – Russian

Let’s now take a look at what the official app description reads for this amazing app from ABBYY:

Features:

• Easy information input
• No Internet or mobile network connection is required
• Quick and accurate word translation
• Up-to-date high-quality dictionaries
• Audio pronunciations by professional speakers of translated keywords
• Auto and manual corrections
• User-friendly, intuitive interface

Now let us come to its actual performance of the German-English version which we played around with for this review. We searched for some German content on the Web and used the app to translate to English. In the first test (3rd screenshot), the app correctly detected and translated “Weihnachten” to ‘Christmas’. Next we moved to a German news article, where the ABBYY FotoTranslate application again correctly detected the German word “Regierung” (4th screenshot) and translated it into ‘Rule/ Reign/ Government’.

So the application comes with an equally good OCR engine as their earlier hot selling application ABBYY Card Reader. However there are few popular languages like French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc. which are missing as of now in this application.

What we like?

1. Ease of use: Just start the app and snap the words!
2. Don’t have to bother about changing the keyboard layout to that of the foreign language
3. No data connection required for translation
4. Manual and auto edit come in handy at times

What we don’t like?

1. No versions available for languages like French, Spanish & popular Asian languages.
2. Absence of audio pronunciations (English-Italian and Italian-English versions).

Verdict

ABBYY’s PhotoTranslator is one of the most innovative OCR based apps, a genre where ABBYY continues to be the market leader and more so in the mobile platforms. While the app does have a few limitations as listed above, the overall experience is more than satisfactory and we wouldn’t hesitate from giving this app a “must have”, especially if you are traveling to countries in which the above European languages are spoken. For the rest, lets hope our friends at ABBYY will come up with more versions of this app in this year.

The app is priced at USD 7.99 - 9.99 and going by the feature set and its usability, its a great bargain. Get the one you would need from our app store.