We are happy other people reuse our code. From the groups of people from academia and industry that use Mezzofanti, we are pleased to point to this project – because it is an Apache License 2.0 project, that looks for contributors.
http://code.google.com/p/droidslator/
Droidslator version 1.0 is the first language translation program desiged for android-powered phones, seamlessly combined both online and offline dictionaries databases. Droidslator contains many intelligent features such as gesture commands, online/offine search auto-detection and other interesting features.
What is Mezzofanti: it is an application for the Android Dev1 phone, that allows reality augmentation (as seen in camera mode) with information about any text in view. The augmentation is done through text-recognition.
After the augmentation, the digital text (or parts of it) may be used in various modes:
- it may be translated in one of the 40 available languages
- it may be searched on Google or Wiki
- it can be checked against a dictionary
Technologies:
- the OCR engine is a modified version of Tesseract 2.03, currently developed by Google under Apache License, ver 2.0. – there are 5 available languages available: English, German, Spanish, Italian and French. Never the less the OCR will work with any other language that uses the Latin alphabet (the results will be a bit less accurate).
- the interface between the OCR engine (C++) and Java is done in JNI
- the main core is programmed in Java
- the translation engine is based on Google-translate
Licenses:
- all code is available for free under the Apache License, ver 2.0 and it is posted at google code. Read the install tutorial.
Dialogue:
- we encourage the dialogue, so please do feedback us. (feedback may include, but it is not limited to: observations and questions about code, wish-list of new technical tutorials, contributions to the project, collaboration opportunities etc.)
- a brief documentation of the Mezzofanti user interface and the System architecture.
Who was the real Mezzofanti:
Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (19 September 1774 – 15 March 1849) was an Italian cardinal and famed linguist and hyperpolyglot. Mezzofanti was well-known for being a hyperpolyglot who fluently spoke thirty-eight languages and forty dialects, despite never traveling outside of Italy. (more about the cardinal on Wikipedia)
