LIVE ON-SCREEN JAPANESE TRANSLATION WITH OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION MOBILE APPLICATION

Abstract

Languages are a tool of communication used by humans. Languages are used by human as a main form of communication within a community. By learning a language, being able to communicate with others who speaks that language might prove to be beneficial, be it in a business, technological, or even in a cultural context. Being able to speak a foreign language also allows one to connect with the native speakers of said language, which possibly unlock a whole new side of the world.

There are a significant number of languages used throughout different places and times, with it comes its own writing system. Some uses the widely known Latin alphabets, such as English and Bahasa Indonesia; and some uses logographic characters, such as Japanese and Chinese.

Learning a new language can be especially difficult when said language’s writing system uses a logogram, where a written character represents a word. When a learner encounters an unfamiliar logogram, it can be quite exhaustive for the learner to look up the definition of the logogram. To mitigate this predicament, a mobile application is proposed to speed up the rate of looking up logogram definitions. The application was made with Japanese as the target language.