Nowadays, machine translation is improving rapidly. Image translation technology, which machine translation has focused on in recent years, offers users a practical translation method. The foundations of image translation technology were laid in 2003, and it has progressed exponentially since then. Picture translation uses ‘Optical Character Recognition’ technology to detect the language in the image you want to translate and then translates this into the target language. Then, the translated text is transferred onto the image with the ‘digital image processing’ method. English-Turkish translation service is used frequently in our country, and users think that picture translation technology prevents time loss. Google Translate, a translation application frequently used to translate English to Turkish with pictures, continues to improve image translation by adding new features. The application comes with instant camera translation, gallery image upload, browsing options and helps users in Turkey with image translation in more than 100 languages, especially English to Turkish translation. The other two most preferred image translation services today are offered by ImageTranslate and Yandex.
Pros and Cons of Image Translation Technology
Image translation allows us to instantly read the texts of posters, ads, signs, or menus in foreign languages. Let’s say you went abroad and want to read the menu in a restaurant or want to know what street signs say. You can translate texts without the hassle of typing them into the application simply by holding your camera to the text. Image translation is the most useful method since it can be challenging to write foreign texts, especially in languages with different characters than the Latin alphabet. When translating from English to Turkish, we do not encounter this problem like we do with Chinese or Arabic. However, there are also situations where the speed of image translation leads to incorrect translations. When translating images, it should be kept in mind that the algorithm directly translates the text it detects, and it doesn’t take the context into consideration, especially in long texts. If you want to translate a detailed or important text, it is best to avoid image translation. Even in English-Turkish translation, the errors in the image translation increase as the sentences get longer.
Learning English with English-Turkish Image Translation
Although it is practical to translate images, it cannot go beyond daily use, at least for now. Image translation may eliminate the need to learn by making our job easier rather than encouraging us to learn a language. In addition, image translation might create misunderstandings in complex texts and cannot help lengthy English reading and comprehension studies. Image translation should be considered as an additional aid that you can apply in the English learning process. To put it briefly, image translation helps its users overcome minor language barriers by providing instant visual translation, but it is not considered an educational tool.