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Universal Translator for Text?

I don’t think we’ve ever seen them on-screen. I remember a novel (I want to say “The Crimson Shadow,” it was something that had both Picard and Cardassians in it) describes a transparent sheet you could lay over a page to translate a printed book. I imagined it looking like one of those flat book-lights.

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Tangentially related, but the (original) opening scene of TMP had the Epsilon gang listening in on the Amar's transmission, and the UT was reading out the captain's words in a computer voice over the original voice while the text of the translation was displayed on a side screen.

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The Director's Cut clips out the text overlay and AI translator bot.

Mark
 
Wasn't there an ENT episode where they used a tricorder on alien text and it did a Google Lens kinda thing? Or did I hallucinate that?
 
Honestly, the easiest solution is to use normal Glasses, and have a AR (Augmented Reality) Overlay for text that you don't understand and have real-time text substitution by the Universal Translator.

Have a small camera mounted on the bridge of the nose in the center for Video Recording and Stereo Audio Recording.

Obviously, IRL people are working on that, but for it to be as simple & light-weight as a standard set of glasses would be very nice.

The Spider-Man: Far From Home glasses that Tony Stark left Peter Parker has similar capabilities.
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Obviously, you don't want to go crazy and program in that much functionality like Tony Stark did.

Keep the functionality simple & basic.
 
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We see plenty of Universal Translator for Spoken Languages, but what about Text?

Do we ever see UT's for written Text?

I think we have in VOY.
When they encountered the monument which had engramatic recordings of the massacre... the UT was used to translate the alien text if I'm not mistaken.

And if I'm not mistaken there may have been other instances... in VOY: Distant Origin, TNG: Darmok, DS9: The Abandoned, TOS: Metamorphosis.
 
Wasn't there an ENT episode where they used a tricorder on alien text and it did a Google Lens kinda thing? Or did I hallucinate that?
Must be in the manual
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Drat—I dropped it.
 
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