What you can do with Google Translate on your smartphone

Scripophily catalogues in German, reference books in Russian, English magazines .. and you are familiar with neither one of these languages. Still, there is that particular, promising, antique share certificate described in this non native language. Persistent as you may be, you feel that a language should not be a barrier for your broad interests. And right you are !

Google Translate icons

Google Translate for mobile translates in 90 languages

You can use Google Translate for mobile to solve the situation. This mobile app - a computer program (application) running on smartphones and other mobile devices - combines your phone's camera with two software technologies :

• optical character recognition (OCR), a piece of software converting images of text into computer characters
• machine translation, software that translates text or speech from one natural language to another.

Sounds complicated, it is, but in this case it is easy to use. Does it work ? Let's find out.

Translation in 6 steps

As an example, we'll use the following, extensive, Italian catalogue, which was published by Portafoglia Storico. Our goal is to translate the text below the certificate on the page to the right. Double-click the images below for  more details.

Assuming Google Translate for mobile is installed on your device, start up the app and go through the following steps :

1. Choose the source language

In this case it is Italian. Use your fingertips to tap, scroll and select from  the list of source languages.

2. Choose the target language

For this example, similarly select English.

3. Aim your phone's camera to the page, and tap the camera icon. 

Tip: If text is printed in smaller columns you can hold the camera vertically in line with the page. In contrary, when text is printed over the entire page width, as is the case here, it is easier to turn the camera 90 degrees.

4. Try to fit the entire text on your camera screen and tap Scan. 

At this point your camera scans the text, and the OCR software will try to recognize separate words.

Note: Just before you tap the Scan icon, the software will try to instantly translate and show the result on your phone's screen. This feature was designed for instant translation of simple messages and signs in public places. Just ignore this behavior and tap Scan to proceed.

5. When the scan operation is completed, the system shows you all the words it has recognized. Tap the Select All Words hint, to let the system translate all the words.

Note: If only one or a few words need to be translated, then you can tap and swipe with your finger to select these words.

6. The software now shows you the first words of the translation. Just tap the  >  arrow icon to see the entire translated text. 

Italian to English - text in a single page-wide column
Not a good result, but individual words can help you to understand the general content. 

The results are mixed for our purpose

Google Translate for mobile works well when translating simple message boards in public places. But translating "technical" texts is much more difficult. Double-click the image above. It shows an Italian to English translation. The result contains English words, but sentences are not accurately translated. The translated words can help you to understand the general content. It is up to you to make up something coherent from the result.

In general these are some findings :

• Some languages are better translated than others
• I had relatively satisfying results with French, Norwegian, and sometimes Chinese.
• Some languages tend to use longer sentences than others. This makes it more  difficult for translating a text correctly.
• Text printed in small columns translate better than text in a single page wide column
• Check the image below, where the app translated a short entry in a Chinese catalogue. That worked rather well. Interesting, catalogues often describes lots in multiple columns.
• Texts printed in multiple columns tend to consist of shorter, simpler sentences that are easier to translate by software.

Chinese to English - text in  two columns
Short phrases in columns yield good results.
PS : Notice the dates, similar to Japanese dates, see more here 

Russian to English - text in a single page-wide column
Not a good result, but individual words can help you to understand the general content.

Time is on our side !

I am sure that, in the near future, we will use technology that allows us to scan textual information, translate it, and have it projected directly on our eye lens by means of special glasses, contact lenses, an implanted chip, all within a blink of an eye. But for the time being, we'll have to do it with Google Translate on our mobiles. 

F.L.

Related links

• You can download and install Google Translate for mobile here 
• Online article Google’s Translate App Can Now Use Your Camera to Translate the World in Real Time

P.S. Signed the Guest book yet ?

Digest of scripophily readings XV

New online scripophily articles and references, December 2014

Biografía de las Riquezas de Puerto Rico

Jorge David Capiello-Ortiz tells us a fascinating story about the history of coffee plantations and sugar mills of Puerto Rico.  His Spanish website, Biografía de las Riquezas de Puerto Rico,  (Riches of Puerto Rico) is illustrated splendidly with photographs, coins, bank notes, tokens, post cards, letters and receipts, stereoviews, checks, and ofcourse stocks and bonds from :

• sugar mills, see here 
• railways, see there, and
• banks, see here . 

As you see, numismatics in the widest sense. Thank you for sharing Jorge !

Central Aguirre Associates
later renamed into Central Aguirre Sugar Company
100 Common shares, specimen, 1928
double-click image to enlarge
source : Jorge David Capiello-Ortiz
Biografía de las Riquezas de Puerto Rico

The Californian Gold Rush

The first individual gold prospectors tried to build subterranean shafts by manually digging holes into overlying earth, as into a hillside. The shafts seldom reached deeper than one or two meters. This technique was called ‘coyoting’ after the coyote that tunneled his way into the ground in a similar manner. No stocks or bonds, but coins and pictures illustrate this three-part series of articles about the Gold Rush in California written by Ursula Kampmann from CoinsWeekly | MünzenWoche  :

• part I : the first gold finds, news reaches the east, the voyage, the local situation, grassroots democracy and lynch law (in German, see here ) 
• part II : the work, success and failure, spending a life in deficiency, xenophobia amongst the gold prospectors (in German, see here )
• part III  : coins for California, the end of the gold rush (in German, see here) 

Compagnie Française & Américaine de San-Fransisco
5 Shares of 5 Francs, 1850
Source : HWPH, Auction 36, 2014

Texas and German Emigration Company
The Bullock Texas State History Museum, named after former Texas Lieutenant Governor  "God bless Texas" Bob Bullock, certainly knows how to combine artefacts with interactive multimedia and special effects. I will not go into further details, but check out this Interactive Texas Map .

Eurotunnel forerunner
If, before the Great War, a tunnel would have existed between France and England, it could have shortened the War by two years. Read more about the Chemin de Fer Sous-Marin entre la France et l'Angleterre on Hans-Georg Glasemann's NONVALEURS blog.

Scripophily magazine

In addition to the online sources above, the last August 2014 No.95 issue of Scripophily magazine contains the following stories :

• Scripophily of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
• The Long Distance Telephone Company and AT&T
• Rare Chinese scripophily at Spink's Jan 2014 Hong Kong auction
• Flights of Fancy, about early spectacular airplanes
• Cox's Corner : Scanning certificates
• Jewish Colonial Trust
• An interview with retiring society auctioneer Bruce Castlo
• Sexy vignettes
• other periodical topics : society matters, news, bourse reviews, auction reviews, events calendar, member classifieds, book reviews, interviews and lots of pictures of collector friends and scripophily.

F.L.

Hunt down your collectible with Google Images

A picture is worth a thousand words.

In this article you will learn about an alternative and easy way to seek information about your collectible. The method is applicable to any object such as a coin, a banknote, a postage stamp, et cetera. And because scripophily is the main subject of this blog, I'll use a share certificate as an example in the procedure explained below.

Sine Laboratory Compay Limited
Share certificate, 1948, Shanghai
double-click image to enlarge

When conventional search methods yield nothing at all

Do you recognize this situation? I 'google' for a company name that appears on a share certificate and find no results. Then I retry the search with other search engines. OK. Now I initiate a search operation on my local computerfiles and hope some Excel or PDF document will show up in the results. Alas. I do not want to give up yet. Next I check out my bookcase for any reference books in which the name might appear in their indexes. As I was beginning to fear : nada, nothing, rien de knots, niente. When this happens, well .. %&$#?@!  ... there are no words for it. Stuck with a certificate I know nothing about, I end up storing it in an album and hope another attempt,  maybe next year, will yield better results. 

Google Images

Most of us already know how to use Google Images : you enter a search term and the result shows images that correspond to the term or phrase entered. However, in 2011 Google came up with a new feature. It allows you, instead of entering a search term, to upload an image. Any image, therefore also an image of your collectible. Holy smokes!

You can take out that untraceable certificate from its album, the one you put away a year ago. Scan it, or take a picture of it with your smartphone, and upload the image to Google Images. Unless your certificate is a rare piece, Google will likely find you similar images and links to corresponding webpages. It doesn't matter if the text on your share is in your familiar alphabet or not.

Identifying the signature of actor Roger Livesey

Many old bonds and shares have a handwritten signature. Frequently the writing is hard to read. Recently I learned a trick that can help you identify a signature.

Adam Films Ltd was active in the British film industry
share certificate for 25 Shares of 1 Pound
representing 1/6th of the initial capital, issued in 1949
printed by Chas, Davy & Co. Ltd
double-click to enlarge image

Roger Livesey

The certificate above was issued to Roger Livesey Productions Ltd. Roger Livesey (25 Jun 1906 – 4 Feb 1976) was a British stage and film actor. Between 1921 and 1970 Livesey featured in not less than 40 movies, often teaming up on scene with his wife Ursula Jeans. During World War II, together they volunteered to entertain the troops. Livesey played the lead role in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) which established Livesey's international reputation. 

The London Gazette from April 10 1975 announced the Adam Films company had ceased its operations, a few months before Roger Livesey passed away. 

This looks like Roger Livesey's signature.

Skewing and stretching a signature

With some good will, the signature above can be read as Roger Livesey. But you can make it more readable by skewing and stretching the image. These image editing functions are available in image editing programs such as Microsoft Paint. This is the result :

The signature is more readable now. The image results from applying the following image editing operations to the original :

• Skew horizontally : -40 Degrees
• Stretch horizontally : 120 Percent

Here are some guidelines  :

• When the handwriting inclines
• to the right, then use a negative number of horizontal skew degrees, e.g. -40°
• to the left, then use a positive number of horizontal skew degrees, e.g. 30°
• When the characters appear
• flattened, a 'n' looks like a '_', then use a vertical stretching percentage larger than 100, e.g. 130%
• narrow, a 'd' looks like a '/', then use a horizontal stretching percentage larger than 100, e.g. 140%

Caution: being able to identify the name in a signature, does not mean the person actually wrote it. On stocks and bonds, a signature was often written by someone else, a secretarial signer. In our example this is maybe improbable, but possible. I don't have any further references to signatures of Roger Livesey.

MS Paint window displaying the Stretch and Skew functions.

Reduce contrast to reveal a hidden underprint

What is an underprint ?

When two different designs are printed over one another, then we speak of a design with an underprint. 

Malabar Forests and Rubber Company
Shares of 50 Rupees (10 Rs. paid up)
Bombay, 1921
double-click to enlarge

On the example above, we can distinguish two printing designs : an elephant (the underprint design) and the main design containing the share's text that was printed on top of the underprint.

Some underprints may look hazy or even be hidden

Not all underprints are so clearly recognizable as our fierce elephant shown above. A good example is a certificate of the Charbonnages André Dumont, a Belgian coal mining company.

Société Anonyme des Charbonnages Andre Dumont
English: André Dumont Coal Mines company
Kasbon 10 Frank, unsigned
17 May 1940, Waterschei (Limburg province, Belgium)

Well, you actually can't call this a bond, though the word 'Kasbon' (English: savings certificate) is printed on  the certificate. From Schwan-Boling's World War II Remembered, we learn that it is a local Belgian emergency note printed between the initial German attack, 10 May 1940 and the Belgian surrender on 28 May 1940. Due to the initial chaos several communities were forced to issue emergency currency.

So far for history. The image shown is not a bad scan. The actual piece is just printed in such subtle colors. Reducing contrast is the trick that will result in an image with a more recognizable underprint, as you can see here.

Image of the same certificate, but with strongly reduced contrast settings.
Double-click to enlarge.

For the record, I am not in favor of embellishing images of scripophily papers. Images should represent the true look of the certificate. However, I see no problem in editing images for researching purposes.

What is contrast ?

In digital image editing, the word contrast stands for the difference between dark and light. When increasing contrast, the darker pixels are pushed towards black and the lighter pixels towards white.  Otherwise said, the difference between the tone of a darker pixel and a lighter pixel is increased. The opposite action, decreasing contrast, yields more visible shades of darker and lighter pixels.

Société Anonyme Agricole et Industrielle d'Egypte
4% Bond for 500 francs, Cairo, 1905
Printed by Imp. VVe. Monnom, Bruxelles 
Hard to tell at first sight and even at second sight : 
there is an interesting underprint present.

How can you decrease the contrast ?
You need a digital image editor which is a piece of software that you use to edit digital images. I have tried the following software products : MS Digital Image 2006 Standard  Edition Editor and Picasa 3, both locally installed on my desktop, and Pixlr Editor an online photo editing software, see here . The latter allows you to upload your image, edit and share it to other social platforms or download it back to your desktop.

Something that struck me was that each of these softwares handle a different name for the contrast editing function. In the mentioned products, this is the function that you should apply for decreasing contrast :

• MS Digital Image 2006 : in the Touch-up menu, decrease Contrast 
• Picasa 3 : in the Tuning tab features, increase Shadows (yes 'decreasing contrast' has the same meaning as 'increasing shadows')
• Pixlr Editor : in the Adjustment menu, increase Contrast in combination with a decrease of Brightness

Société Anonyme Agricole et Industrielle d'Egypte
detail of the underprint of the bond listed above
After reducing contrast in Picasa, the remnants of an ancient temple appear.
Double-click to enlarge.

What if the underprint is still not clear ?

To illustrate this topic, I'll use the Japanese bond depicted below.

This  patriotic WWII bond was issued by the Japan Hypothec Bank in 1942.  Between Dec 1937 and Aug 1945 this bank sold over 4.2 billion Yen in war bonds, most of them in denominations of  15 Yen or less. This particular bond shows a falling bomb with the Japanese name 大東亜戦争 which means Greater East Asia War. The term was introduced to mark the period when Japan extended the war from a regional conflict in China to a wider war all over South-East Asia and the Pacific. The red rays behind the bomb are derived from the Japanese military flag and represent the sun.

Schwan-Boling's book mentions that the bond was printed by the Toppan Printing Company from Tokyo. As an anti counterfeiting measure, the large red serial number was printed on the face and back of the certificate. The number on the back was the mirror image and aligned perfectly with the one on the face.  Extremely difficult to reproduce.

 

5 Yen patriotic wartime bond 1942

issued by the Nippon Kangyo Ginko (English: Japan Hypothec Bank)
-

The blue round logo of the bank is printed at the top
and is repeated several times as a watermark.
double-click to enlarge

There is also an underprint but it is hardly noticeable. So, as I did before with the other certificates, I scanned the certificate and reduced the contrast in the image. This was the result : no significant improvement. The underprint was still unclear.

The underprint is still not very visible after reducing contrast.

Miserable molecule of mildew! The only thing I could think off, was using the edited image, not the originally scanned image, again as input for the image editor software. So I reduced the contrast on that "second generation" image, and that gave a better result. Now, you can see that a map appears in the underprint. Visible is : China, the South Korea peninsula, Japan's major islands Hokkaido and Honshu, and Taiwan as well.

Double-click to enlarge and detect a map of South East Asia.

Summary of the procedure

1. Scan the certificate with an underprint.
2. By means of a digital image editing software, see some examples above, reduce the contrast drastically, and save the resulting image.
3. If the underprint is still not clear, then repeat step two, but instead of using the original scan, use the resulting image from that step.

Another example where I reduced the contrast of an underprint, can be seen here . 
I'm sure that some of you have similar certificates.
Were you able to reveal the barely visible underprint ?
Did you follow the same approach ?  

F.L.

p.s. Concerning the bond with the hidden map: to be honest, I am a bit disappointed that I didn't find a spot on the map marked with an "X".   8)


N.B. More nice examples of underprints can be found here and there .

A share in the Carlton affair

The Carlton Hotel, a French hotel, became recently a hot topic in several international newspapers. The case, called the Carlton affair, involved high-profile figures booking rooms with some "extras" (prostitutes). You can read all about that here and there .

Société Anonyme du Carlton
Action de 500 Francs, Lille, 1927
Printed by Lith. L. Nuez
double-click to enlarge

The hotel was built after World War I with the financial help of the British Carlton hotel group in the center of the city of Lille. During World War II it was partly destroyed. Currently the hotel counts 60 rooms and suites. The Coupole Suite, 100 sqm space, located in the dome offers a panoramic view and much more and can be seen here.

Facade of Hotel Carlton
source Wikipedia France

The facade of the hotel is also depicted in the underprint of the Carlton share.
An ordinary scan could not sufficiently reveal enough details from the subtle tinted image.
In order to bias the subject, the contrast of the original image was strongly reduced.

In 2007, the hotel became part of the Hotels & Preference hotel group and in 2010 the Carlton was used as a location for the movie Pour solde de tout compte . According to Europe1, the current scandal and its media coverage generates extra interest in the hotel.

F.L.

How to create nice scanned images that are smaller in size ?

Did you know that with a little trick you can reduce your scanned images to one fourth of the original file size ? The trick is called Microsoft Paint. Time for a little experiment.

Step 1: Scan a bond certificate

I deliberately choose a certificate that includes a design and is printed in more than one color : a bond issued by the French administration for postal services and telecommunications (French: Postes, télégraphes et téléphones). I use a regular scanning configuration : a resolution of 200 dpi, True Color coding. The resulting image measures 1413 by 2082 pixels and has a size of 2169 kB .

14,80% French P.T.T. bond of 2000 Francs 1983

This public administration was split in 1991 into La Poste and France Télécom.

The bond was issued only one year after the PTT launched Minitel.

Minitel was the first large scale succesful pre WWW online service.

Step 2 : Open the file with MS Paint and save it.

Open the image with MS Paint. Do nothing except for saving it. As a result the image has still the same measurements 1413 by 2082 pixels, but surprisingly its file size shrunk to 557 kB !

I can not explain it fully but I guess the outcome is caused by the Paint software that somehow converts the True Color coding scheme to an older less precise type of color coding.

Anyway, the dimensions are still intact, and equally important, the image looks as good as before. I tested this procedure with a more plain certificate printed in one color and lacking any decorative features : same results.

Summary

• original : 2169 kB
• open and save with MS Paint : 557 kB

Step 3 (optional) : 75% Resizing

In a final step, I usually use MS Paint, or another software, to reduce its size to 75% of the original. Applying this step to our example brings us to the following result : 1060 by 1562 pixels, file size 323 kB. 

 F.L.

Digest of scripophily readings I

Scripophily is gaining momentum on the Internet ... again ! I googled the word scripophily today with the following outcomes :

• 470,000 results on web pages (50% related to Ebay)
• 92,900 results on images
• 26 results on videos

Ofcourse not all results are relevant to the serious collector, but still, the numbers are impressive. People are writing more about scripophily on the Internet. This posting will highlight newly discovered notable articles. You can expect similar posts on a  periodical basis.  If you don't like it, just tell me in the comments !

So, let's get on with it, here's the digest.

How I collect scripophily

An experienced and enthusiastic collector tells us about the joys, some why's and how-to's in his article, published as a part of the How I Collect series of The Ephemera Society of America.

Library Scripophily

.. is the latest posting on Larry T. Nix's Library History Buff Blog, see here. More library scripophily is shown here.

North American railroad certificates with price history details

Terry Cox offers an improved reporting page on price history details, see Price history details improved .

When the ICE age started

The reason why I base this posting on content published earlier by another blog author, is that I felt this topic was important for scripophily collectors.

Before the ICE age

I used to spend a lot of time in assembling a decent image from the separate scans made of the parts of large certificates. Summarized, this was my procedure for large certificates :

1. Scan the upper half, sufficiently overlapping with the other half (1 - 3 cm).
2. Similar, scan the lower half.
3. With an Image Manipulation Program (IMP), crop the upper half so that the lower blurry border, is cut away. The blur appears in the generated image because that side of the certificate reaches beyond the scan surface.
4. Straighten the upper half and save the image file.
5. Similar, crop the lower half, so that the upper blurry border is cut away.
6. Straigthen the lower half and save the image file.
7. Import both cropped and straightened halves into the IMP.
8. Align both halves, so they make up a nice whole again. This is a very accurate and time-consuming part of the procedure.
9. Crop, sharpen, ... the final result and save.

Usines et Visseries de Haren

Share of 100 Francs, issued 1899, Haren, Belgium

(click image to enlarge) 

When the ICE age started, things were never the same again.

ICE is a brilliant image stitching program that was probably designed for stitching together landscape photographs into landscape panoramas. But it also works great for stitching together the separately scanned parts of large shares and bonds.

My large certificate procedure now looks like this when using ICE:

1. Scan the upper half, sufficiently overlapping with the other half.
2. Similar, scan the lower half.
3. Drop the set of images into ICE and save. You can even enable the creation of a thumbnail image.
4. Crop, sharpen, ... the final result with an IMP and save.Wow ! The stitching operation is accomplished in a few seconds.

Check this out on the Coxrail blog !

Working with ICE is straightforward. The software is free but there is a little software setup involved. You can read all about it on the Coxrail blog, see here. Terry, a great find ! Thank you.

Give it a try. You'll have no more excuses for not scanning your large ceriticates.

F.L.

Fold shadows and backlight

Haste and laziness do not reward

Yesterday, I fooled myself by trying to gain some time by making a "quick" scan of an American stock certificate. I put its front side on the scanning surface. The cover of my scanner device has been removed, which allows me to scan parts of large certificates more easily. I pressed the "scan" button on the device and thirty seconds later, the image was generated. This was the result. Poor !

Hm, not good at all. This was not the result that I expected as several shortcomings in the image can be identified (click the image to enlarge) :

1. Shadows along the folds
2. Hazy details and letters along the fold areas
3. Print patterns from the backside visible through the image
4. Faint colors

A better alternative for emailing large images




Société Minière Intercoloniale
1945, Berberati, French Equatorial Africa
rough diamond in underprint
(click image for details)

 

Suppose you want to email someone a high resolution scan of this certificate. Creating high resolution images of your beautiful certificates can result in large files.

However, emailing these files to others may result in the following problems : 

1. Once the image is sent, your email program stores a copy in the Sent folder which becomes larger and larger.
2. The receiver may experience long download times when receiving his e-mails just at a moment where he or she probably quickly wants to get his emails. 
3. The receiver might be out of the office for a few days. In that case, your images could fill up his emailbox, preventing him from not receiving any further emails.

60 % at 10 o'clock, or how can you name your scanned detail images ?

This detail map (click to enlarge) shows the railway line of the Kristianstad-Hessleholms railway company. It is a vignette on a 1906 share of the Kristianstad-Hessleholms Järnvägsaktiebolag. The railway company was founded in 1863 and nationalized in 1944.

I often scan details of certificates, but how do I name these images ? The scanned image of a whole certificate gets the same filename as the ID - identification number - of the certificate in my database. In this case, the certificate has an ID of 1405.  So, the image has 1405.jpg as its filename being the name of the certificates ID and the file type "jpg" in this case.  

Scanned image files of details on certificates also need a filename. This is how I do it. Just take a look at the example of the Swedish railway certificate.

1. 
   
   First, we need to position the vignette from a reference point.  I use the center of the certificate, which is at the crossing of the bisector lines. Now, imagine a clock in the center of the certificate.
2. 
   
   We position the vignette as a combination of a direction (an hour on the clock) and a distance of the center of the vignette from the center of the clock (0%) to the border (100%).

So, our detail image can be "positioned" at 10 o'clock - 60% . The filename of the resulting scan will be 1405_10_60.jpg, which is the outcome of the certificate ID, the hour position and the distance % and the file extension jpg.

Purists, can question this example and argue that 1405_1030_55.jpg is more accurate. However, it is an approach that has worked well for many years now, and, when ordering the files by filename in your file folder list, detail images get sorted along with the images of the whole certificate.

So, that's how I do it. I'd happy to learn from other approaches. In case you'd wonder, here is the whole certificate's image.