( note: if you’re working with a document where the text is already in one column–like a letter or printed report–you can skip this step.) A screen capture program, preferably one that has a crop function (the Windows 10 Snip-and-Sketch program is perfect for this).I appreciate where you’re coming from, but you need Google docs for this. Sorry, if you’re anti-evil-corporate entity, this won’t work. Just when I had resigned myself to holding up my phone to my computer screen, I found that there is another way.
Further, trying to transfer it from your device onto a computer is difficult, since the main function of Google Translate is … well, to translate. The camera function isn’t perfect, and it’s hard to edit. The problem is for those of us who are more interested in getting a clean version of the original Arabic text. But it only works on your phone or tablet. Someone clued me into the fact that the camera function on Google Translate does a passable job of reading Arabic with its camera function - which it does, and if you need a quick (usually really bad) translation, it will suffice. Is that a smudge or the letter ق? Is that a bump or an initial م as rendered in the ruq’a script? The writing is inconsistent, and (especially for a non-native speaker) hard to decipher. The problem–as anyone who works on this period immediately understands–is that the original was handwritten on hard wax, printed onto paper, and then photographed. Let’s take this column I’ve been working on out of Al-Muqattam, an Egyptian newspaper, from 1918. My productivity has gone up substantially. It’s a little cumbersome, but I’ve been using it to produce translations of newspaper articles in about as much time as it would normally take me to try to skim them. I discovered by accident that Google Docs has the holy grail for people who work with Arabic and Persian: Optical Character Recognition.
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