NEW : The Insect Label Decipherer

[wollastoni]

All entomologists are sometimes faced with this problem: you have a specimen with a label written in Chinese, Japanese or any language you don’t know well (French, Czech…) … or a label in English badly written by a previous collector.

You’d like to know where the specimen comes from and when it was collected.
InsectNet is there for you! Discover the Insect Label Decipherer.

This is what it does on a Japanese label :

insect-label-decipherer.png (211.4 KiB) Viewed 776 times

Now you know that it comes from the city of Shichinohe (Japan), the collecting date, that the specimen was caught on a flower and you have the name of the collector !
You even have a Google Map link towards the identified locality !

The maximum size for the label is 1 MB.

Please try it and let me know if it can be improved.
It took me few weeks to develop it and I hope it will be useful to some of you. Let your collector friends know about it.

[adamcotton]

This looks really useful for collectors and researchers.

Will a link to this service be posted on the Insectnet homepage or somewhere easy to find? Currently it seems only to be accessible through this thread.

Adam.

[wollastoni]

Thanks Adam, it is in the "Blog" section.

Not sure it deserves a specific menu section.
Maybe in the future when we will have more "tools".

By the way, if you guys dream of any other digital tools that could be useful. I would be happy to think about it.

[benihikage92]

It seems like a great app. However, to ensure, you might as well have it checked with a native speaker of the language used for the label.

The app failed to read 犹, which is not an often-used character, skipped it, and translated it as "flowers." 犹花 is the name of a place.

So the label should be:
七戸町/犹花　
Shichinohe Town / Ezobana

Is it a label for a Parnassius citrinarius specimen?

Kuni

[wollastoni]

Sure as you can see, the app does not include "犹" in the original text so it doesn't translate it.
It includes only the character it recognizes of course. If the label was less blured, it would have included it.

In this example, Shichinohe town is a precise enough locality.

Yes it is a P. citrinarius specimen, a classic locality for it.

[mokky]

I respect the development of this wonderful app. It will eliminate the frustration you had been feeling for a long time with so many collecting labels only written in Japanese.

I would like to ask my friends and colleagues to make sure that the English translation is also included in their labels from now on.

Of course, as is already mentioned above by another Japanese member, this app is not perfect, so it is a good idea to check with a native speaker just to be sure.

mokky

[wollastoni]

Thank you Mokky, it can also help Japanese / Chinese collectors with labels in a language they don't know (Russian, French, Czech...).

[Chuck]

If you translate a label, you should add that to the original label- never replace an original label.

[wollastoni]

Indeed, never replace an old label.