The Xerox machine may be a dinosaur of the 20th century still taking up space in your office, but here's a cool new trick by the old dog. The company just revealed a feature called Xerox Translates that will auto-translate the text of anything you put into the copy machine into one of more than 30 languages, then spit out a print-out of the translated version.
What's nice if you don't have a ConnectKey-enabled Xerox machine around, and might be more useful overall, is that Xerox Translates has an app, too. Take a picture of your document and you'll get an instantly translated version sent back. You'll be able to upload JPEG and other files to a web service for the same purpose.
After a free trial period, you'd have to pay per page to use the service. There's also an option to have a human rather than a machine translate your text, which is no doubt more accurate. But that costs 10 cents per word, so you're looking at a fee of nearly $20 to translate just this little story you're reading.
Andrew's from Nebraska. His work has also appeared in Discover, The Awl, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Playboy, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with two cats and a snake.
