How to translate text from a picture - program. Text Recognising

There is no doubt that sometimes you have to work with documents containing graphic images with some text in a foreign language, which is subject to translation. About how to translate text from a picture or convert it into a readable format, now it will be a speech. It should be noted that this procedure includes several main stages, which need to be paid special attention.

How to translate text from image: options for action

To begin with, any program must initially recognize the text in a graphic format, then determine the language on which it is written, and finally translate. The main problem most users face is not even recognition of text or language, but the fact that most translation programs are not efficient enough in terms of translation. In fact, this is a so-called machine translation, which many are not welcome, since it may contain errors related to the morphology of the language itself, which was originally used.

Nevertheless, if you try, for example, to translate English text from a picture, the order of actions can be as follows:

• Converting graphics to text format;
• Language recognition (optional);
• Editing the original text (preferably, but not necessarily);
• transfer.

Text recognition with ABBYY FineReader

At the first stage, when a user has an image with a text in a foreign language, it should be translated into a plain text format. ABBYY FineReader software package, which is considered to be the leader in its field, is the best for this.

Recognition of the text is simple enough. In the program itself, you need to open the desired image file (or just drag it to the application field), then press the recognition button and wait for the document scanning process to finish . If you want, you can set the language of the source document (if there are several, you can set this parameter, for example, Russian + English).

Export

Then you can do the export of the fragment or the whole text. It's very easy to do this in the program itself.

When the text is recognized, it can be copied for further insertion into any text editor or translator, but there is a possibility of quick saving to any other format. For convenience of use it is better to choose the format DOCX, which for MS Word is the main one.

Inserting a fragment into text editors

Now you need to insert the text into the editor. If you copy the selected text or a fragment in FineReader to the Word editor, paste is done from the clipboard with the appropriate command from the menu or with the Ctrl + V shortcut (this is known to everyone). If the initial text was saved as a file, you just need to open it using the menu commands or the usual double click on the document.

Now the most important problem is how to translate text in Word? Alas, in any way. This text editor is simply not meant for translations. But there is a way out. The program allows you to install in your environment special add-ons ("Ruta", "Play", etc.). After installation, an additional section on the main panel and a button for quick access to the translation operation appear in the editor itself. It is enough to select the desired fragment and activate the translation.

How to translate text from a picture in an interpreter?

A fairly good method of translation is the use of specialized programs or online services. One of the most powerful can be called the service translate.ru or a similar program-translator PROMPT, which is installed on the computer. In any case, the interpreter needs to insert the recognized text or fragment, specify the translation direction and press the start button. Depending on the volume, the translation may take some time. True, the online translator has limitations on the number of characters that can be inserted into the main field for the source text. In addition, it is a machine translation system. But in most cases the translation is done not by individual words, but by whole phrases or sentences taking into account the specifics of their construction and even idiomatic expressions.

You can, of course, refer to resources where such transactions are performed by "live" translators, but, as a rule, they are all paid, and even translation, based on the volume and complexity of the text, can take a lot. But in programs it is possible to make, so to speak, rough translation, and under condition of possession of some language to make a clean editing yourself.

Using Screen Translator

But before us is a program that from the picture translates into the source material, and from one language to another quickly and confidently without any transformations, which were described above. The fact is that it already has built-in engines for text recognition (Tesseract) and translation (Google Translate). How to translate text from a picture using it? Very simple! To capture a text fragment, use the Ctrl + Alt + Z key combination, then when the left mouse button is pressed, the fragment of interest is highlighted, and after a while the results appear - a window with recognized text and below the translation window.

Nuances of recognition and translation

How to translate text from the image is already a little clear. Now a few words about additional actions at all stages. To get a high-quality translation, it is advisable to immediately edit the recognized text fragment (correct grammatical mistakes, remove unnecessary spaces or formatting). In the future, this will simplify the work of the application-interpreter, since some programs can perceive the same gaps as the end of the sentence.

Machine translation is recommended to be used solely as a draft, since texts of a specific orientation (technology, pharmaceuticals, etc.) may not always be translated correctly because they have a lot of terms that are simply not available in the online resource or program database. But in the same service translate.ru or a similar stationary program, you can initially specify the scope of the source text (computers, technology, medicine, etc.). This will simplify the task of the translator even more.

conclusions

That, in fact, everything that concerns the translation of texts from pictures. What to use? It seems best to first make the recognition, then make the editing, and then - the translation in the program. Screen Translator shows good results, but by and large none of the currently created programs can translate text from one language to another correctly. This is due only to the fact that any language has its own morphological features.