Translating

[ladybarbara]

Hello. I scanned some German documents to My Pictures. Is there any way of copying and pasting them into an online translator such as Babel?
Thank you for any help

[markysngc]

not if you scanned them as a picture, look for the option in your scanner software to scan using OCR (optical character recognition) which will then scan it as a word document or similar which you can then copy and paste into babel to get a (bad!) translation.

[ladybarbara]

Thank you! I'll have a go. Is there a better one than Babel?

[markysngc]

Nope not really, none of the online translators will give great results as they do a fairly literal translation and don't really take into account the differences in the structure of the language.

They are OK if all you want is to get an idea of what the German document is about but it won't quite read right.

Think like the instructions in cheap Chinese products where they have been translated into English word for word, it never quite works. (though some can be very amusing)

[ladybarbara]

Hello. I can't find this OCR, I can't find any options with the scanner!
All I can find is different formats, I always save scans as JPEGs
Can you help again?