Mobile translator

So I was thinking the other day, while traveling, how useful it would be to be able to translate street signs, menus, and signs when traveling in a foreign country. So one way to deal with this problem is to crack open a translation dictionary and look up each word. Of course that means a lot of looking up stuff and that can be a real pain in the ass. Not to mention really time consuming. Next way to deal with this problem is to use an electronic translation dictionary. This seems like a faster solution but you still have to type each word. So less time consuming but still chews up time.

Something I started to carry around when I go traveling to other countries is a GSM cell phone. It's really simple to get a local GSM SIM and the cost is usually really cheap compared to roaming charges with a US cell phone. More recently the phones I've been carrying around have become more powerful. Most have reasonably high resolution camers. My mind then connected the two and the thought came to me that you could take a picture of the item and translate it some how.

The rub with image translation is that it's computing intensive, both image to text and language to language. Even the hot new iPhone 3G doesn't appear to have enough horse power to do the translation in a reasonable rate. Next thought, ship the image of to a massive server to take care of. So what I finally came up with is a mixed device solution, using a cell phone and back end serves. A user takes their cell phone, sees something they want translated, they take a picture with a special translation app. The translation app ships the image to a backend server which does the OCR work (web service?). Once the image is translated to text the text is shiped to a translation service (web service?). The result translation is returned to the cell phone/pda.

This seems highly doable to me but just needs to have the pieces to be brought together. Another feature that came to mind was to give the translation service a hand by using the GPS, found in most cell phones, to tell it where you are, ie what is the origin language or languages.