I know that google goggles will translate a picture to text. What I want to do is allow the user to take a picture (no problem), translate that picture to text(?) and then do some processing on the text (no problem).
Is there any API on android that allows this? or is there any way to programtically communicate with google goggles? I would hate to have the user use goggles then select the saved file with my app.....
Take a look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1106202/android-ocr and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1062578/what-kind-of-ocr-java-library-should-i-use-in-android if you want libraries that do the translation on the phone itself.
However, Google also provides a WebAPI that does this. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-docs-ocr.html
Just remember that OCR (optical character recognition) is, as of now, an inexact science and you won't get flawless transcription in all cases...
There's an OCR API at http://www.wisetrend.com/wisetrend_ocr_cloud.shtml - it was specifically designed with mobile development in mind