The IrisPen Translator is a small handheld scanner that can scan lines of text in printed documents. It connects to a PC via a USB port, and inserts the scanned text into a word processing or email program so that it can be sent to friends or colleagues.

This version of the IrisPen adds a translation facility. Text scanned in one language can be translated - in a fairly literal fashion - into another. The pen can recognise English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese.

However, it can only work with two languages at a time, so if you want to switch from, say, English/German translation to English/French you'll need to reinstall the supplied language software.

This Executive model is aimed at business users, and has the ability to scan barcodes and read handwritten numbers. There's an 'Express' model that lacks these last two features and costs £125.