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Finding your way around a foreign country and buying food at the shops can be a nightmare. Ismail Haritaoglu at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, decided to do something about it. He linked a palmtop computer to a digital camera and a mobile phone and took pictures of Chinese labels next to food in a Chinese grocery. The palmtop sent the images over the phone to a server which used software to read the Chinese characters and translate them into English. It beamed back the translated words within 10 seconds, and Haritaoglu’s palmtop then superimposed them over the Chinese characters displayed in the original images. The system could be used to translate street names, train timetables and even restaurant menus, he says.