A receipt or business card from abroad — later, you can't remember what it even was

Look back at a receipt or business card you picked up abroad, and you might not remember what you bought or who you met. That's especially true when it's written in a language you're not familiar with.

Translation can actually make things harder to recognize

When you're sorting through foreign-language receipts or business cards, it's tempting to think "wouldn't it be easier if this got translated?" But proper nouns like store names or people's names were never really meant to be translated accurately in the first place. Translate a Chinese-character store name into another language, and it often drifts further from the original than it should — making it harder, not easier, to recognize that same shop or person again later.

So the original text is kept as-is

Pilofy keeps proper-noun-heavy fields — a receipt's store name and line items, a business card's name and company, a ticket's station and route names — in their original language instead of translating them. In practice, attempting to translate them tended to hurt accuracy, so we went with the position that foreign information is better left as-is.

Recognition itself is built to support 15 languages, including Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese, so whatever language a receipt or business card is written in while you're traveling, it still reads details like the store name, amount, date, name, and contact info and organizes them for you. The names and store names inside just stay untranslated, in the original language — which turns out to be more useful later, when you're cross-checking against the original or trying to find that place again.