The prototype uses Google’s machine translation technology and image recognition capabilities to create an additional layer of useful context. So should the user take a photo from his Android device, the application can translate the text in that photo — though right now it only supports German-to-English translations.

 

Here’s how Google describes the process:

 

“You may wonder what’s happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone’s camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.”

 

You can’t get your hands on the updated application yet, and Google is being coy about when it will release an update, but you can expect the application to eventually support photo-to-text translation in each of the 52 languages supported by Google Translate.

 

Once translation makes its way into Google Goggles we can only imagine how useful the application could become to travelers looking to quickly translate menu items, street signs and transit information.

 

相关新闻（转自cnblogs）

 

Google CEO Eric Schmidt在巴塞罗那的MWC 2010大会上展示了一张Nexus One上运行Google Goggles进行OCR文字识别的图片，这个新版Google Goggles不仅可以利用拍照来做OCR识别，还可利用Google Translate将识别出的文字实时翻译成你看得懂的语言。

 

今天，Google放出了一段详细的介绍视频，演示了拍照、文字识别、翻译的整个过程。目前这个技术还只支持德语到英语的翻译，而且还在实验中，但将来会出现在新版的Google Goggles for Android应用程序新版里，且会支持Google Translate支持的全部52种语言之间的互译。