How Do You Say “There’s an app for that” in Spanish?
December 17th, 2010 - 8:39 am
Word Lens uses the video camera in your iPhone or iPod Touch to translate Spanish-to-English (or the other way around) in realtime, using augmented reality. That’s right, you take video and Word Lens instantly and automatically replaces the language it sees with the language you want to read — no network connection required. That kind of CGI used to be done by giant server farms in Hollywood during post-production. Now your phone does it for you effortlessly, anywhere.
The future just arrived.
That just rocks.
Effing sweet. I might just have to become a fanboi because of this app.
Get back to me when it can handle arabic and hindi.
I searched for “Word Lens” and the only thing that came up was a free demo version that replaces words with a reverse spelling. The demo says the working version costs four or five bucks, but if it didn’t turn up in the App Store search I’m suspicious.
For a rather less ecstatic response from an actual linguist, see Mark Liberman at Language Log,
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2849#more-2849
(He likes the ad, though)