Techniques for distributed optical character recognition and distributed machine language translation

A computer-implemented method, comprising:

• receiving, at a mobile computing device having one or more processors, an image of an object comprising a text in a source language;
• determining, at the mobile computing device, a degree of optical character recognition (OCR) complexity for performing OCR on the image to obtain the text;
• when the degree of OCR complexity is less than a first OCR complexity threshold the first OCR complexity threshold representing a degree of OCR complexity that the mobile computing device is appropriate for performing, performing, at the mobile computing device, OCR on the image to obtain an OCR text;
• when the degree of OCR complexity is greater than the first OCR complexity threshold:
• (i) transmitting, from the mobile computing device, at least a portion of the image to a first server, and
• (ii) receiving, at the mobile computing device at least a portion of the OCR text from the first server;
• determining, at the mobile computing device, a degree of translation complexity for translating the OCR text from the source language to a target language;
• when the degree of translation complexity is less than a first translation complexity threshold the first OCR complexity threshold representing a degree of translation complexity that the mobile computing device is appropriate for performing, performing, at the mobile computing device, machine language translation of the OCR text from the source language to a target language to obtain a translated OCR text in the target language;
• when the degree of translation complexity is greater than the first translation complexity threshold:
• (i) transmitting at least a portion of the OCR text to a second server, and
• (ii) receiving at least a portion of the translated OCR text from the second server;
• and
• outputting, at a display of the mobile computing device, the translated OCR text.