Topic: Interest in smart phone app for restaurant menu transation (Chinese -> English) (Read 970 times)

A few years ago I grabbed a document put out by the government in China that listed "official translations" for Chinese dishes (it was created in the run up to the Olympic games) and put all of the translations (after a lot of manual effort in order to make them more consistent and concise) into an application whose purpose was to use this information as a starting point for creating translations for specific restaurant menus.

Back then I was trying to create a small business that would provide English translations to local restaurants and did get a bit of interest but it wasn't really worth the effort without the work being far more simplified (testing of several typical local menus would only generate around 20-40% of hits within the DB of known dish names).

After a few months of effort I ended up with over 3,500 dishes (where quite a lot are basically the same dish named slightly differently in Chinese).

I think now a better idea might be to develop a smart phone app which would operate using OCR and the DB in order to show you a translation of any dish name that you scan (if it can't find an exact match then the dish name can usually be pulled apart to identify the cooking style, flavouring and major ingredients).

The DB itself could also be greatly increased by crowd sourcing (perhaps for small BTC payments per menu) making it then more viable for using it with the app I developed to do specific translations.

If anyone has any interest in (and even better has experience with) developing such a smart phone app please let me know.