Russian Language.

[scook17]

Can anyone recommend some good cyrillic OCR software. I have a number of books written in Russian. The OCR software I use with my scanner does a pretty good job and saves a hell of a lot of typing should you need to have an electronic copy of something. With a decent OCR program that supports the Russian language, you could scan a page of a Russian book, and then use a machine translator (eg PROMT) to translate the text to English. Any suggestions?

Kind Regards,
Shane Cook.

[Taz]

Shane,
Are these of any interest? Take a look.

http://www.royfc.com/ru_lingo_software.html

http://www.neobee.net/~ilicv/ocr.html

Eddie.

[Nota Bene]

Shane,

I am not sure this is such a good idea. Even the best OCRs can achieve 95% accuracy max, and the resulting document needs to be proof-read. If you feed it in the PROMPT without proof-reading you may get total nonsence.

Alexei

[rboomsma]

I have used prompt for translation, it needs to be heavily edited after, unless you already completley understand Russian, I would not recommend it.

Ron

[d-riemer]

Shane,
for several years, I am using the Russian software ABBYY FineReader 4 for English and German optical character recognition. The character recognition is outstanding, for printed masters usually 100%. For licensing reasons, Russian is not included in my Version 4, while Bulgarian and Ukrainian are. The software has been upgraded and is now at Version 7, which includes Russian.

Search on the Web for "ABBYY FineReader" and you find lots of offers, even on ebay, with dramatic price differences. Since it was developed in Russia, I assume it would do the Russian or Cyrilic character recognition at least as well as it has worked in my experience with the Latin characters and the German umlauts (the software contains dictionaries for the main languages and checks the spelling of each word after recognition, it should, therefore, not be difficult for software to do a word-for-word translation into English that might provide some basic understanding of a text; that is the way I try to translate text now, which requires a lot of time).

I would love to translate Russian or Bulgarian texts but have not advanced to that point yet. Your question reminded me to investigate that field again.

[Taz]

The top link I posted is also for this Russian software ABBYY and many other items.

Eddie.

[RedMaestro2]

As far as I can tell, the Russian term for research is "punching" (Пробить, Пробивкa). What is the story behind this word choice?


Alex

[Simon]

Пробить means to break through, hit (not necessarily punch) through. In spoken, informal language, the word can mean to achieve a hard task that required overcoming difficulties. I can only guess the origin of a slang usage. Most likely, it comes from the military where breaking through an enemy's armor or bunker is a difficult, often necessary task. With most Russian men having served in the army and in the case of the older generation fought in a war, the language is rich with expressions originating from military terms. You can probably figure out what object Russian men call pilotka.

[deValcourt]

I have a couple of public domain digital copies of propaganda posters from the Stalin era that I would like some more context on than I can glean from the text itself (and as such, I will happily read any translations provided by either native Russian speakers, members of an FSU country, Soviet historians (amateurs included) or any combination of the above without prejudice of one over the other because meaning will win out over literal translation) as to exactly what the purpose of the poster(s) was - other than to frighten people.

Any input will not only be helpful, but I will give the appropriate credit on my website when I use whatever information is shared here.

I may continue to ask similar questions of the forum members about other forms of propaganda - either direct or indirect used by the security services and the actual men behind them pulling the strings.

- I have the impression that the last propaganda piece has to do with the spy plane shot down by the Soviets during the Cold War, but am not 100% certain about this idea.

Phillip

[Lapa]

Phillip,

Nice and interesting time-dated pieces

The third one, as you rightly guessed, is a cold-war period poster which refers to the flights that the US was frequently undertaking outside of the official air corridors over East Germany in order to map Soviet facilities in that country. The usual "excuse" was "navigational error" Thanks to these "errors", by the early 1960, Western allies had surveyed about 85 to 90% of the East German territory.

On a few occasions, US planes were shot or forced down by Soviet fighters or anti-aircraft fire. All of this culminated when Gary Powers' U2 was shot down over Soviet territory.

Marc