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Am I the only one to be surprised by the overwhelming reaction of the HN crowd? Doing word by word translation is not so exciting from a technology point of vie

by toumhi 16y ago

Am I the only one to be surprised by the overwhelming reaction of the HN crowd? Doing word by word translation is not so exciting from a technology point of view, is it because all the other apps doing translation on a phone are crap? I believe there are libraries that already store language translations, right? Seriously wondering why everybody is jumping and shouting how great and disruptive this is.

kelnos 16y ago
I think it's more the speed, and the fact that it's not just doing the word-by-word translation, but it's doing OCR first, and, as a nice touch, it at least makes a vague effort to visually look similar to the original text (well, color at least)... and it does all this without using a network connection at all. The 'traditional' method of firing up something like the Google Translate app, manually (and potentially painfully, if it's a language that uses symbols you aren't used to typing in on a regular basis) typing in the text, and maybe waiting for a server in the cloud to spit back response... is just crap compared to something like this. Even if Word Lens doesn't do proper grammatical and idiomatic translation (yet?), it still seems like it'd be super useful.
jodrellblank 16y ago
You should be the only one being surprised. This isn't just a nice app, it's a killer app. People will buy smartphones/iTouches/tablets for this purpose. Alone. This is a simple to use, cheap app. on an existing popular platform which makes a significant improvement on a task a lot of people want to do. You're standing there saying "What's all the fuss about Chrome and FireFox? I can browse the internet with IE6 and have done for years!". This reaction is future shock, this is a surprisingly strong wave in the flow of future technologies and it's shaking people up.
CamperBob 16y ago
Gestalt is everything.

by toumhi 16y ago

kelnos 16y ago

I think it's more the speed, and the fact that it's not just doing the word-by-word translation, but it's doing OCR first, and, as a nice touch, it at least makes a vague effort to visually look similar to the original text (well, color at least)... and it does all this without using a network connection at all. The 'traditional' method of firing up something like the Google Translate app, manually (and potentially painfully, if it's a language that uses symbols you aren't used to typing in on a regular basis) typing in the text, and maybe waiting for a server in the cloud to spit back response... is just crap compared to something like this. Even if Word Lens doesn't do proper grammatical and idiomatic translation (yet?), it still seems like it'd be super useful.

jodrellblank 16y ago

You should be the only one being surprised. This isn't just a nice app, it's a killer app. People will buy smartphones/iTouches/tablets for this purpose. Alone. This is a simple to use, cheap app. on an existing popular platform which makes a significant improvement on a task a lot of people want to do. You're standing there saying "What's all the fuss about Chrome and FireFox? I can browse the internet with IE6 and have done for years!". This reaction is future shock, this is a surprisingly strong wave in the flow of future technologies and it's shaking people up.

CamperBob 16y ago

Gestalt is everything.