Sharp PC-1475

[Nigel (UK)]

I too have recently acquired a Sharp PC-1475, advertised as "untested" but working perfectly once new batteries were fitted. Since my knowledge of German is limited to the libretti of JS Bach's sacred cantatas, and the overlap between these and the German manual is limited, I thought an English manual would be nice.

My strategy: start with a scan of the German manual (downloaded from the Sharp website); split this into 428 jpeg images; feed these to Google Translate; deskew and despeckle the translated images; and reassemble them into a new pdf. The tedious part was feeding the images, one at a time, to Google Translate. In the end this took no more than two hours, so it wasn't too bad. (I am certain there is a way of doing this programmatically, perhaps using Google Cloud Platform, but in the end it seemed quicker to just do it by hand.)

You can download the result from here: PC-1475_Owners_Manual_EN.pdf (a 70MB pdf file).

It's far from perfect: Google Translate has produced strange variations in font size and some odd wording, and the bleed-through of text from the other side of the scanned pages remains. But given the minimal effort required I'm pleased with the result.

Nigel Dowrick

Edit: see later post for improved version of this translation, along with a tidied version of the original German scan.