I have spent three days here in San Francisco at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit 2010 and I will spend even more days because the Iceland’s volcano eruption caused such a huge ash cloud which closed the almost the whole air space of the Europe.

Some time ago we published an article and a YouTube video about the PhotoTranslator application which we have developed. We were surprised of the attention it gained. Many people asked us, when will it be available and we have decided to release an alpha version of PhotoTranslator. So if you want to test it, you can install it directly from Maemo extras devel repository AT YOUR OWN RISK.

PhotoTranslator Alpha Features

As you probably have understood already, the PhotoTranslator is not a final version yet and it lacks features. It may, or it may not work as you expect, but as stated before, use it at your own risk. We also needed to remove bunch of languages from the application because they  increased the package size to 95M.  PhotoTranslator supports only the following languages from  tesseract i.e. the languages that it can read from the images (OCR) at the moment:

• English
• Finnish
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese

NOTE: This means that you can translate, but you can only use the OCR for the languages listed above. The workaround for this is that you can write the text manually and then translate it.

PhotoTranslator Beta Features

For beta version we are planning to implement the following set of features:

• Separate package for each supported language
• User can download different language packages via PhotoTranslator
• Disabled buttons for languages that are not installed
• Support for capturing images with PhotoTranslator

We are also investigating if we could open source the application at some point. More details will follow later.

Installing PhotoTranslator

The only thing you need to do is to enable extras-devel repository from your application manager. Check the details below.

In the Application Manager:

• Navigate to the application menu (tap the title bar)
• Select ‘Application catalogs’
• Select ‘New’
• Enter a catalog name of ‘Maemo extras-devel’
• Enter a web address of ‘http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel’
• Enter a distribution of ‘fremantle’
• Enter components of ‘free non-free’
• Select ‘Save’

Feedback

We would like to receive feedback of your user experience. You can give your feedback about PhotoTranslator in comment section. We will also later provide an email address, which you can use to send your feedback directly.

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