Why Google Translate's Camera Feature Is Risky for Medical Documents
Camera-based translation (like Google Lens or Google Translate's photo mode) is genuinely useful for quickly understanding a foreign menu or a street sign. It reads the text it can see, and translates it word by word or phrase by phrase — but medical documents are exactly the case where that approach breaks down.
Medical reports are dense with abbreviations that mean different things depending on context (for example, "PT" can mean "patient," "physical therapy," or "prothrombin time"), handwriting that OCR (the text-recognition step before translation even happens) frequently misreads, and numbers/units where a single misread digit changes a lab result's meaning entirely. A camera-translation app has no way to know which meaning is correct in your specific document — it just picks one.
For anything you will act on — a diagnosis, a prescription, a lab result you are sharing with another doctor — it is worth getting an actual human translation, even an informal one, rather than relying on what a camera app guessed.