Thing Translator is a web app that lets you point your phone (or laptop) at stuff to hear to say it in a different language. It was developed as part of Google's AI Experiments project. You can try a live demo here.
Behind the scenes Thing Translator is using Google's Cloud Vision and Translate APIs.
To start a development server on 9966 that will watch for code changes simply run:
$ npm run dev
To optimize the output for production run:
$ npm run bundle
Unfortunately this experiment does not work on iOS or desktop Safari (at least until Apple allows camera access from the web).
If you'd like to create a fork or a similar project, you'll need to setup some API keys on Google Cloud Platform.