How to use OCR

[soenandar]

I just bought OCR full package, I am on iPhone 4, iOS5.
I want to translate short phrases from my kid's Chinese school book into English, Please guide me what to do.
I presume, after buying Pleco OCR, just to point camera/video to a chinese phrase/text and it will give instant English translation, however, I can't make it work.
I tried to paste the OCR text into dict page, however, it shows the meaning of only the first word, not the rest of the phrase.
Please assist.

Rgds, Soe

 

[mikelove]

I just bought OCR full package, I am on iPhone 4, iOS5.
I want to translate short phrases from my kid's Chinese school book into English, Please guide me what to do.
I presume, after buying Pleco OCR, just to point camera/video to a chinese phrase/text and it will give instant English translation, however, I can't make it work.
I tried to paste the OCR text into dict page, however, it shows the meaning of only the first word, not the rest of the phrase.
Please assist.

The best way to do this would be to use "Capture Text" instead of "Lookup Words" mode - you can use that to dump a block of text into our document reader where you can then tap on individual words to look them up.

Also, if you pause the recognizer you can tap on words right in the recognition area to switch the definition to them (instead of the first word).

 

[soenandar]

Hi Mike,
ur suggestion looks like we need to translate one word by one word.
Anyway we can translate a phrase or a paragraph?

 

[mikelove]

Hi Mike,
ur suggestion looks like we need to translate one word by one word.
Anyway we can translate a phrase or a paragraph?

Yes; Settings / General / Tap-hold Translator / Translation Source -> Bing, then tap-hold on a character in the reader screen, drag the handles to resize it to cover the whole sentence, and tap "Translate" to translate it.

It's a bit awkward because full-sentence translation isn't really what Pleco's about - we're mainly trying to help people who already know some Chinese (or are in the process of learning it) and so we tend to push for partial forms of assistance like single word lookups; we don't want to make it too easy.