Have you ever found yourself buying something online and, once you receive it, the instructions are in a different language? Well, I have. SHAPE Services, best known for applications like IM+ All in One Messenger (reviewed earlier today for a beta update), have just released a new application that will help you figure out how to work your newest purchase.


Photo Translator is a picture to text translator for your BlackBerry device. Currently in open beta, Photo Translator is free to test as long as you give them feedback and help them build and work through the bugs.  The current list of features are:

- Accurate Text Recognition – Reliable OCR (optical character recognition) technology allows grabbing the text from images in a few seconds.
- Translation Management – Translated text can be saved to Memo, sent by email, or used in other apps.
- Translations Gallery and Search – Save results for later reference and quickly search through them.
- Multilingual Support – Photo Translator supports English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Czech, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and many other languages.

SHAPE Services has a pretty neat application here. Once launching the application, you have four choices. Take a photo, View Results, Settings, and Info. You select Take a Photo, then you will select the language you want the response to come back translated into. Then you take a picture of the text that is in a different language (see photo below).


After doing so, Photo Translator will send your photoed text over your data service and come back to you  in your selected language.  Now, I’m using SHAPE Services photos here, but  believe me when I say I did this with my recently purchased  Black Friday Bissell Vacuum (my dog chewed the old one’s power cord into 15 pieces) and it did  turn the French version into English. Very accurately I might mention!


As I mentioned above, Photo Translator is currently on version 0.9 open beta. Meaning you can get in on this, leave them feedback, and in return for helping them, they will toss you a free license if your help was indeed helpful! I will say I’m extremely impressed by this. Especially the fact that you can save the translated information into an email or memo. If you have a BlackBerry with an auto-focus camera (89xx, 95xx, 96xx, 97xx or 9800), I would suggest signing up for Photo Translator, but I want to hear from our readers! Does this application interest you? If it does, how much do you think the price point would be for such an app??

You can get in on the beta for PHOTO TRANSLATOR HERE.