In this paper, we presents a mobile based snapshot translation system, Cyclops. The system takes an image of Chinese text as its input and translates the textual content of the image into either Portuguese or English, or both. The underneath design idea is to provide user a comprehensive user interface in using language translation tool to access the meaning of non-native text. The system has been developed based on different technologies including image processing, Chinese optical character recognition and machine translation. In this article, we focus on describing the character recognition module which uses Peripheral Direction Contributivity (PDC) for representing the features of Chinese character. Most importantly, it has been tailored to run on common use mobile devices which have memory and storage limitations. ©2010IEEE.