Now I can sort of read my Japanese cards!

SumoMenkoMan has sent me a lot of Japanese cards. I really appreciate that because I would have pretty much zero chance of getting them otherwise. But I couldn't read them. Luckily, and somewhat confusingly, the team and player names are in English on the basketball cards...but I couldn't read the backs at all.

Until now!

Yesterday, my brother got a new phone, nearly identical to mine. He was the first in the family to have a smart phone and it's dying, so it was time to upgrade. When he was checking out his new one last night, we saw an icon on the camera screen and didn't know what it was, so naturally, he clicked on it. As it turns out, it's something called Google Lens, and it has a few options. You can place it over food to find out more information (something I've not used yet), over products or images to pull them up on sales sites or a general Google search, it can copy text, and on the far left of the icons- Translate.

My first thought was about cards. I ran and grabbed my phone, and I had it too. So then I went and got one of the latest cards Ryan had sent me and tried it out! It's not perfect...but it's a heck of a lot better than it was before!

 This is a regular picture taken with the camera on the phone

This is a screencap of Google Lens. As you can see, it works pretty well but not perfect...it translated Brave Thunders as Brave Sanders, I'm not sure what Students should be in the bio area, and it gets the nouns a little confused (we don't refer to people as It) but this is a FAR cry better than it was before! When I could read nothing. Interestingly, it didn't translate the stat headers, but they were printed in English anyway.

I've actually got half a mind to go in and screencap each and every one of my international issues- not just the Japanese cards. I've also got cards from Germany, Belgium, and others, although the vast majority of untranslated cards are Japanese.

This is a pretty cool tool to have, now I need to get out some of my world coins and see if it can translate them...