How cool is this, an ordinary looking photocopier can scan material with Japanese text and spit out translations in English or Korean in the same layout. The copier works by being connected to a dedicated translation server online, so it doesn’t do the work by itself. It does however, feature algorithms which can distinguish between drawings or images and text. That algorithm must be pretty good considering Japanese and Korean characters are impossibly complicated. Especially to us Westerners.

The copier is unnamed and the technology is very, very, prototype. So there’s no telling if or when these will hit the market.

Photocopier translates Japanese to English at touch of button [DigitalWorldTokyo]