IRISPen™ Translator 6 is just a great tool that every student, interpreter and other people should have if they need to translate text from one language to another. I ran IRISPen™ Translator 6 using XP professional using a Macintosh iMac with the Parallels application. Other virtual applications were also trialled. The recognition and the translation were very rapid but not instant, despite the fact that I was running Parallels.

It is important to read the quick start manual before proceeding with installation, as there are differences in XP and Vista. The electronic manual is very useful. You can also hear the language if the speak button is switched on.

IRISPen™ translator has 13 interface languages. The IRISPen recognizes 128 different languages. All American and European languages are supported, including Central-European languages. Greek, Turkish, the Cyrillic ("Russian") and the Baltic languages and Hebrew are also supported. Optionally, the IRISPen reads Asian documents in Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean.

Thanks to the @Promt Office Translator translation software integrated into the IRISPen Translator, you can directly translate your scanned text lines into any of the two languages chosen at the installation. You scan the text and the translation pops up in a separate translation window.

Supported language pairs:

1. •With English interface: English < > French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian; 
   

2. •With French interface: French < > English, German, Russian, Spanish;
   

3. •With Spanish interface: Spanish < > English, German, French, Russian;
   

4. •With German interface: German < > English, French, Spanish, Russian.
   

After you have started the application, it is essential that the pen be calibrated. Otherwise you will get garbled alphabetic scripts or weird symbols across the translation screen.

@PROMT Office is the key to using the translator pen, but ensure that your settings are established first. If this is not done, incorrect translation or system errors occur. The context of the translation is spot on and provides an accurate translation as shown below taken from the documentation sheet.

‘A Quick Start Guide will guide you through the product installation and show you the basic use of the product so you can quickly be on your way. It is available in 7 languages marked with an asterisk: English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian’.

‘Un Guide de Début Rapide vous guidera a travers l'installation de produit et vous montrera l'utilisation fondamentale du produit donc vous pouvez vite être sur votre voie. C'est disponible dans 7 langues l'anglais, le français, l'allemand, le néerlandais, l'espagnol, le portugais et l'italien’

Using non-complex language the accuracy is 100%. But when using complex language it is not as accurate, nonetheless it is 95% accurate.

You can translate directly into Word and other applications such as Excel, Mail etc but the outcomes are not as robust, for example: ‘Benutzeroberflache sowie die Online-Hilfe sind in den gleichen 7 prachen verfugbar.’

The pen has two buttons so that you can easily execute what you need to do in your applications; the buttons can also be adjusted to suit your programming. You can copy and paste or even modify the text or the translation to suit your needs. You can customise the pen to suit your needs by using the Pen buttons in the toolbar.

PROS: Instant and accurate recognition of many languages, an excellent speech synthesiser, extremely useful and simple to use and affordable.