Reviews of OCR/Translation Apps

Scan & Translate icon

Scan & Translate

Where bought/found: iTunes Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scan-translate-image-scanner-and-translator/id816177666?mt=8

Is it for Android, iOS, or both? iOS only

scan original-ver2

 

 

 

On a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (best), how would you rate its OCR performance? 4

OCR of above:

ARMI LES NOMBREUX ANCÊTRES PAQUET venus en Nouvelle-France, au xVIIe siècle, et qui ont fait souche pour la plupart, les généalogistes s’étendent plus longuement sur Méry Pasquier et son fils Maurice. Parce que leur histoire n’est pas banale et qu’ils ont probablement laissé la plus nombreuse descendance.

On a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (best), how would you rate its translation performance? 3

Translation of above:

ARMI THE MANY ANCESTORS PAQUET who came to New France in the seventeenth century for the most part, the genealogists extend more extensively on Méry Pasquier and his son Mauritius. Because their story is not trivial and they probably left the most numerous descendants.

Can you scan more than one page at a time? I could not find a way to do this.

Price: $2.99 (There is a free version: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scan-translate-ocr-image-scanner-translator/id845139175?mt=8)

Month and year of review: Dec 2017

Notes: According to the app description, Scan & Translate…

Recognizes texts in more than 70 languages
Translates to more than 90 languages
Reads texts in more than 40 languages

For multi-column text, it reads across the first line of each column before moving down to the second line. Each column has to be scanned separately.

It does not recognize a drop cap, so that messed up the translation of the first sentence.

Microsoft One Note

Jan 2, 2018 from Peter Marcaurelle

I just wanted to pass on another possible option for OCR. For those who have Microsoft One Note, One Note has OCR built-in. If you scan in an image, it will then allow you to copy text from that image as editable text.

When doing my research and the only text I can find about someone is embedded in an image, I save the image into One Note, and then, after a short period of time, the image has been “read” and any text in that image can then be copied.

Additionally One Note desktop version running under windows has some search ability for English and French.

I take the French text, and then copy it into Google Translate to do the conversion. Some of the text converts cleaner than some, but better than having to translate word by word if you are not fluent. It’s not perfect, but has worked for me.

One further comment, I converted from Windows to Mac approx. 3 years ago. Though Microsoft indicates that One Note for Mac and Windows are essentially the same and data is interchangeable, you can not save the Mac version data locally on your hard drive. The Mac version is cloud based only. Therefore anything sensitive I put on the Windows version which I run under VM on my Mac.

Thought I would pass this along as an option for those who already own One Note.

Adobe Acrobat Pro 9

Jan 28, 2018 from Tricia Wright

I needed to do a Hungarian translation several months ago and had success with Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 (this is an older professional version). Under the Documents tab, go to OCR Text Recognition. I had an option to identify the language as Hungarian. It then turned an old JPEG newspaper article into a text document which I then copied and pasted into Google Translate. The process takes time but it was very satisfying.


 

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