I've been using WorldLens [0] for several weeks and while it has an inferior UI and its translation engine is outright dumb, it works <i>offline</i> and it's a HUGE plus. One needs this sort of app when traveling in another country, so the chances of having WiFi/3G connection are pretty slim, so no Google translation for you.<p>That's not to say that's Google's take is wrong, it's just (far) less practical right now.<p>[0] <a href="http://questvisual.com" rel="nofollow">http://questvisual.com</a>
funny they gave cyrilic as an example. I've recently been on Ukraine and wanted to test it out for fun. scanned part of a menu (capital letters) while in a restaurant with wifi and the result was something like "3KOUIJL3KLJLKOOOASA3IIU". even though Ukrainian!=Russian, with such scan results you can't even attempt to translate it.<p>btw out of curiosity I've tested a few google mobile apps while traveling. my experience:<p>translate - needs internet and failed reading cyrilic.<p>google maps - offline caching didn't work at all, I didn't know how to get to my cached maps as when I start maps it raises a message that I need internet connection and didn't let me go further.<p>google drive - I pressed 'offline' and wanted to create a document and it says I need internet connection. lol.
It's a basic feature, and perhaps it's not perfect, but for those that use this app quite a bit, this is a huge help.<p>Worst case, it doesn't recognize the text, and you type it in, same as you had been doing this whole time.