Babelshot: Translate Instantly Using Phone Camera App Reviews

Could not recognize japanese txt correctly. Not worthy for my 500 yen payment.

Before the latest update my review was: "Often fails to recognize kanji correctly, even in a simple, clear photograph. Quality of Japanese to English translation awful - usually meaningless. Attempts to read katakana like kanji and cant cope with simple numbers. Complete waste of money." After the update, its still as useless as before. Heres the translation it gave me for a retail outlets opening hours and other details: "you want compatible with school-Sa-cycle> 邁 few days over · · · o K: to oO -I will be 22 this Sobatodoroki OO rise Mo~ya OK Tsukematoihettsui Te large Fumio! 丶We nutrient in H Sa-over-cycle surprise 嚢警 竇 Ku 勒務 o I!! 丿 Ku Hettsuiwara 邁勒 Ol !"

Very poor kanji recognition. Sometimes works ok. Better OCR engine needed. Google Japanese translate is awful. But this is the only one out there.

Not working properly, many errors in text recognition, no possibility to process image from the library :/

Application requires Internet connection to translate on Chinese, even if dictionaries are downloaded. Photo translate works incorrect. Waste of money in my situation. (

Best and universal

WASTE OF MONEY!!!!!!!! Wish I knew how to get a refund :/

I cannot get it to translkate anything or even recognize normal print.

OCR didnt recognize ANYTHING. 18 of the 49 languages werent supported and it wouldnt even let you take a pic. Chinese, Arabic, and other languages with characters are the languages not recognized. Piece of junk. So not worth 5 dollars when there are other translation apps out there for less (or even free). Dont waste your time or money like I did. Very disappointing.

This is supposed to be an OCR translator, and Chinese is listed as one of the supported languages. When you try Chinese, it says "Camera input is not supported for Chinese". I want my money back!!!

It translates it into a bunch of random symbols and foreign letters, are you freaking kidding me

Dont lie! They promised all of the languages!

It doesnt work. I spent 4 hours trying all the tips they offer in their trouble shooting section. I tried German, Dutch, and Spanish and it wouldnt recognize any of the phrases I typed up. I even tried to get it to translate English to English and it couldnt do that. They basically stole $5 from me.

Translator is good but it cannot take photo translator

Yesterday, I downloaded this app to my iPhone 4S. Today, when I manually input German text, the translation worked fine. When I took photos, however, all I got is gibberish: a few words and lots of punctuation marks. I have tried this using a photo of just nine German words, and the result was the same: gibberish. In rating this app, I see that I am not in the minority: there are lots of one-star ratings. Yet, when I went to download the app, iTunes said it had a rating of 4+. I dont understand this. And Id like my money back, but I guess that wont happen.

The description is false, an Internet connection is needed for performing the translation. So not useful in china when you dont have service..

Waste of money. Doesnt work at all!!

I had high hopes for this app. I wanted something that would read Japanese text using my iPad camera. Unfortunately, when I tested it on an English-language newspaper (not having any Japanese text around), I discovered that the OCR is very poor, producing lots (maybe 30%) of gibberish. This was using the iPad camera, and getting about as close to the text as the camera would focus (the developers site suggests that people who have problems with OCR in this app are shooting the text from too far away). As a comparison, I took pictures of the same text using another (cheaper, if not free) translator, and the OCR worked perfectly. I repeated this experiment with several text samples and always got the same results. Now, I dont know how this app works for Japanese text, but if its anything like how it works for Latin-based letters, its worthless. It does have two good points: the user interface is nice, and the translations seem to work well (I had it translate into Spanish, a language I know). But thats very small comfort, since the OCR on which the translations are based basically doesnt work. If theyd fix the OCR, this would be a good app.

I agree with the other reviewers on this topic. I am currently in Japan and the translation is total jibberish after multiple attempts with extremely basic text and a clear view of both hiragana and kanji. This app does not perform as advertised and the app company should discontinue marketing until they translations are even roughly correct.

This application does not work! I do not know how it has passed the Apple Store filter but this is a scam! I downloaded this app in order to translate some text from German it is awful. Besides not working it did not even recognize the text appropriately. If I was you I was not going to waste my money on this