TextGrabber 6
It came, it OCR-ed, it translated
$4.99 From ABBYY, abbyy.com Made for iPhone, iPad Needs iOS 9.0 or later
Among the apps that can translate text in another language when you point your camera at it, TextGrabber has a few advantages: It’s fast, it’s relatively accurate, and it digitizes the text in the original language and yours. You could even just use it to OCR text in English, if you wanted to quickly extract editable text from a sign, page, or anywhere you see it.
TextGrabber’s real-time mode lets you tap or hold the button to quickly capture and OCR short bursts of text. If you’re grabbing whole pages, slide the mode picker to Camera instead. The final mode is a QR code reader, which is less handy now iOS 11’s own Camera app has this.
Text is recognized with OCR right on your the device (60 languages are recognized) and displayed as editable text you can copy or share right away. To translate it to one of 104 languages, you have to pay a one-time fee of $3.99 to unlock the app’s full capabilities. Translation also requires an internet connection, but you could save a huge list of OCRed text and translate it later.
Using this to translate newspapers and Shakespeare worked smoothly and incredibly fast, and a menu all in Chinese was no problem either. Using it with paper is easier than with a screen, but either is possible if you hold your device steady. You can select up to three languages from the list to translate between, but can easily switch to others.
THE BOTTOM LINE. TextGrabber offers a lot of flexibility for a low price.