How to photograph a menu so it actually reads
Better Translate Team ·
Our own numbers are blunt about this. The same handwritten board recalled 0.63 of its
dishes photographed at night and 0.32 photographed in daylight. Nothing we changed on the server
side ever moved a number that far.
Recall there means the share of dishes whose exact characters survive the phone's text
recogniser, before any translation happens. It is a ceiling. A character the phone never read
cannot be translated by anything.
Four things that actually help
- Kill the glare first. Daylight on a laminated or glossy board is the single
worst case in our test set. Move your body, not the phone, until the reflection slides off
the part you want.
- Get closer and take two. A menu photographed in halves reads better than the
whole page at arm's length. The app joins what it finds.
- Square up to the page. Shooting at an angle stretches characters unevenly,
and a stretched kanji is a different kanji as far as a recogniser is concerned.
- Hold still for a beat. Motion blur costs you strokes, and in Japanese a
missing stroke is often a different word rather than a typo.
Why a bad scan looks fine
The failure to watch for is not a garbled line, it is a short list. A page that came back missing
four dishes reads perfectly and gives you no signal that anything is gone. That is why the original
text stays beside every line: a thin result is visibly thin next to the board in front of you.
If a scan comes back short, retake it straighter and closer before you try anything else.