Catalog technology

I was lucky enough to get a couple catalogs from Warren Esty yesterday.

One is in German. How to translate a hard copy catalog? I tried the Google translate app. Here are photos of catalog and a screenshot of the translation. All done with the camera. No typing.

 

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That was translated using a screen shot?? Dang, I'm going to download that app immediately. Manually typing the passage when trying to translate something from an image file is a royal PITA!

 

It also will try to translate a live image from your camera, but holding it steady and waiting is a pain. Taking a photo and then letting the app translate is much easier.

 

Not sure about the translation. ... very funny though.

 

I'm remembering a scene from an old movie, maybe one of the Sinbad ones, where someone murmured an incantation over a page of foreign script and the ink rearranged itself into English text.

We're getting very close.

 

Thanks @4to2centBC, I am headed to my iPhone to download that app!

 

The live translation feature I referred to, sort of does that, it is very odd to see it auto translate via the camera. But like I said it was a bit trickier to hold steady and read.

 

I need that app. Very cool.

 

this is the first thought that came to my mind when i saw the OP...





here's a role playing game spell...pretty similar.




i've got serious nerd cred.

 

It's amazing how far tech has come over the past 2 years. Makes you wonder what another 20 will be like.

 

We are Star Trek now, @Mat ... you better go brush up and WATCH all the Series from the Original, through all the spin-offs, and all the Movies produced... Just in case you miss something.

 

To make this work really well, we need a version of the software trained in coin-speak. Current program have the same rules for anything written in a language but could be set for or even recognize ~1000 common numismatic phrases and render passages more to our liking. I do not read French but I can read Cohen because he wrote his catalog in beginner grade coin friendly language. Auto translation software may never render a beautiful passage matching the spirit or poetry of the original but teaching it that German has specific words that should be rendered EF rather than exquisite and overstruck rather than reused. The first step could be to have a talk with your geeky grandchildren that work for Google. They might do it on lunch break. For anyone to do a translation it is necessary for there to be a grasp of both languages and the context of the material. Otherwise idioms suffer.

 

Will never get into Trek or Star Wars

 

I dunno about this thread...



AR vs. AE Sestertius size comparison...

 

Doing that requires a large corpus of parallel, translated texts. So, you would need many coin books translated into multiple languages already to make that work well.

 

I agree that idioms are a key problem in any translation exercise. Idiomatic mistranslations are common.

From a sign in an Italian tailor's shop.

"ladies are free to a have a fit upstairs"

 

Humans will only be the 2nd most intelligent structure on the earth.

 

chrsmat => I always laugh when I see your good ol' Wizard photo ...

=> Diagon Alley, coin-bro!!

 

and when i got to starbucks with my family, not only do i not have any tech on me..i just order a regular black coffee and not chocolate fiz mocha-chino.

not that's crazy.

 

THANK GAWD! I just go for a STRAIGHT BLACK COFFEE, no sugar, no cream, no whip cream, none of that creepy stuff folks pollute a perfectly GOOD CUP OF COFFEE! You are my kinda guy, Dude!