This post is by Phil Price.
“Le Menu Dit” is an iPhone app that some friends and I wrote, which translates restaurant menus from English into French. (The name is French for “The Menu Says.”) The friends are Nathan Addy and another excellent programmer who would like to remain nameless for now.
Here’s how the app works from the user perspective: You take a photo of a printed (as opposed to handwritten) English-language menu, and the app translates it into French. C’est formidable! We don’t yet have a version that goes the other way, which might be of much more interest to readers of this blog, but the whole problem is interesting and has enough of a statistical component to it that it seems fine for this blog. Of course if you or your French-speaking friends want to buy the app, that would be good too! And we will soon be releasing versions that go from English into Italian and from English into Chinese; and a bit farther down the road, probably around May, we will finally have one that goes from French into English. See how we do it, below the fold.
Screenshot of Le Menu Dit results