Good - but could be better...
After reading the very mixed customer reviews, I bought this app hoping for the best and expecting the worst. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised and consider it $5 well spent. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot - but it is definitely a helpful tool for anyone living in Japan or studying Japanese. If youre looking for an end-all solution, this is not it - but for a basic translation program, to help you easily translate multi-character words or short phrases, it works quite well.
The good: works as advertised and performs reasonably well; much more affordable than some other translation programs; good integration of Google translate; quick character recognition (in most cases); allows you to select similar characters if the one IDed isnt correct.
The bad: has trouble with bold-type and irregular fonts; has frequent trouble recognizing certain hirigana (especially "ni" に and "ri" り); computer screen recognition is still a bit lacking; only can recognize up to 12 characters at a time.
The ugly (or things to improve): need a way to combine characters that arent correctly recognized (e.g. "ni" keeps appearing as ( + こ [L parenthesis + "ko"] - and there is no way to combine the two characters to recognize the correct one); on a related note, more input options or search options for incorrect characters would be nice; and finally, to read verticle text you must turn the phone to the right - but (as someone who typically flips to phone to the left when using portrait mode) this can be a bit counter-intuitive - the option to rotate right OR left would be nice. With these improvements, my 4-star rating would definitely be upgraded to 5-stars.
Also, I should note that while the camera on the iPhone 4 allows for recognition of fairly small type, the cameras on the iPod (4th gen) and older iPhones dont have enough resolution for fine print (e.g. news papers, business documents), but are still able to use the app for recognizing larger print and/or signs.
In closing - this app does need additional refinement, but is a useful and convenient tool for simple translations of short phrases. Lets be honest - 10 years ago, this type of thing was pretty much considered sci-fi, so we have to be realistic in our expectations of what it can do. With that in mind, it works remarkably well, and the developer continues to improve and refine the functionality - so things should only get better. I look forward to seeing what improvements the future brings.
lumchanmfa about Japan Goggles
