Terms of Service
These terms govern your use of Scan Chinese at scanchinese.com (“the service”). By using it, you agree to them. If you do not, please do not use the service.
1. What the service does
Scan Chinese recognises Chinese characters from photographs, uploaded images, handwriting drawn on screen, or typed text, and provides romanisation (Pinyin and Cantonese Yale), translation and audio pronunciation. With an account, it also stores the characters you save so you can organise and review them.
2. Accuracy
The service will sometimes be wrong. Character recognition, translation and pronunciation are produced automatically and are not reviewed by a person. Do not rely on the service for anything where an error would matter. Medical, legal, financial, safety-related or contractual text, or any situation where a mistranslation could cause harm. Always have important material checked by a qualified human translator.
3. Your account
- You must give a valid email address, and you are responsible for what happens under your account.
- Keep your password to yourself. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access.
- One person per account. Do not share accounts or resell access.
- You must be old enough to agree to these terms where you live; at least 13, and 16 in some countries.
- You can delete your account at any time from the app. We may suspend or remove an account that breaks these terms, and will normally explain why.
4. Free use and paid features
Signed-out visitors get a limited number of free recognitions and translations. Registered accounts currently have no such limit. Some features call paid third-party services on your behalf, and we may introduce paid plans, change what is included in the free tier, or set fair-use limits. If we introduce charges for something you are already using, we will tell you before it takes effect.
5. Acceptable use
Do not:
- upload content you have no right to use, or anything unlawful;
- submit other people's personal data for recognition without a lawful basis;
- use automated means to make bulk requests, or attempt to circumvent usage limits, quotas or authentication;
- probe, scan or attack the service or the machines it runs on;
- resell the service, or use it to build a competing dataset or product;
- use it in a way that breaks the terms of the third-party services listed on our credits page.
6. Your content
Images and text you submit remain yours. You grant us only the licence needed to run the service: to process your content, transmit it to the recognition and translation providers described in our privacy policy, and store what you choose to save. We do not claim ownership and will not use your content to train models or sell it to anyone.
Recognition and translation results are cached so the same lookup is not repeated. See the privacy policy for what that means.
7. Availability
The service is provided as-is, without any guarantee of uptime. It may be unavailable for maintenance, may change, and may be discontinued. If we shut it down permanently we will give reasonable notice and an opportunity to export your data.
8. Third-party components and services
The service is built on open-source software and depends on third-party APIs. Full attributions and licences are on our credits page. Those components are provided by their authors under their own terms, and we make no warranty on their behalf.
9. Disclaimers and liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, the service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, nor for lost profits, lost data or lost opportunity, arising from your use of the service. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded; including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
If you are a consumer, you keep all the statutory rights your local law gives you, and nothing in these terms takes them away.
10. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. The date at the top will change, and material changes will be announced in the app. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the new terms.