Recently, I watched a few Japanese only yt vids with no auto translate available, plus some Japanese text in the video frames. Wanted to see what the onscreen text was saying, so tried to find an OCR yt or Chrome plugin to do the job. One called Naptha, Chrome plugin, did not seem to work for me at all. My fault or not. Ended up with One-click reading image (OCR). You select text on screen in a still video or other image, it attempts to convert it to text. If successful, use Google Translate to translate it. Kludgy and it has daily usage limits. Then some videos don't have yt's built-in auto-translate CC available for whatever reason. For this, I landed on Auto Translate for YouTube™ captions Chrome plugin. The best I understand this works by doing voice-to-text on the audio before translating. Even yt's own auto-translate get stuff wrong many times and this particular plugin got off track seemingly confused by the speakers colloquial Japanese perhaps? I brought this up in case you need it, and/or if you have better ideas that you care to share.
This is definitely a thing. When I used to email Atom A Amaresura directly for toys (before he did lotteries) his emails were very hard to understand, but other Japanese emails translated no problem at all. I've noticed the OCR function in Adobe Acrobat is not as good as it used to be either. They've made it easier to do, but the quality of translation is seemingly worse and it breaks up the lines now, which it didn't do before.
The OCR app looks interesting. I have a pile of RxH headers that I have no idea what toy they belong to. I wish there was an app that would translate a 'live' camera image of kanji.That's probably difficult - not like Discog's app that reads a bar code.
Actually, Google Translate on my [android] phone does just that. Using your camera, you can have it live translate or freeze img => then translate. Needs live internet, I think? It's possible that the translation package can be downloaded first. But at home, connected to wifi is no biggy.
Thanks fot the info. Just loaded the Google translate app on my iphone and tested out the camera app on some known headers. I worked fine and quickly. Now I will see if I start getting ads for Japanese sofubi.
