[eosrei]

I used this in Brazil this last March to read menus. It works extremely well. The mistranslations make it even more fun. Much faster than learning Portuguese!

I took a few screen shots. Aligning the phone, focus, light, shadows on the small menu font was difficult. You must keep steady. Sadly, I ended up hitting the volume control on this best example. Tasty cockroaches! Ha! http://imgur.com/j9iRaY0

[shkkmo]

I had some Brazilian roomates who didn't speak english (and I don't speak portugues). We used a combination of my poor spanish and google translate off my phone to comunicate.

It worked ok (much better than nothing.) However there were a number of times when there were very large issues in the translations that created some pretty big misunderstandings. Luckily we had a friend who had fluent English and Portuguese who would translate when things got to confused.

To reduce errors, you do need to be really careful to use short, complete sentences with simple and correct grammar. It's also better to use and that contain words that aren't ambiguous. (Those two sentences would probably not translate well.)

e.g. Please write simple words, short phrases and simple phrases. Please write words with just one meaning. Those phrases and words are easier to translate.

[thaumasiotes]

> Please write words with just one meaning.

Those words are very rare and tend to only be useful in very technical contexts.

[shkkmo]

Fair enough. The idea that is intended to express is 'unambiguous'. I tend to try to avoid more obscure words when writing text for automatic translation, often at the expense of explicit accuracy.

[raverbashing]

Interesting

It seems it can't really handle context, so 'cockroaches' may have been a mistranslation of 'cheap' in some contexts, as the 'it had stopped chestnut' may have simply been 'brazil nuts'

[aylons]

Most probably the OCR read "batata" (potato) as "barata" (cockroach).

[raverbashing]

Yeah, this is very likely as well, especially if the t was printed incorrectly