TwicPen is a terminology-assistance system for readers of printed (ie. off-line) material in foreign languages. It consists of a hand-held scanner and sophisticated parsing and translation software to provide readers a limited number of translations selected on the basis of a linguistic analysis of the whole scanned text fragment (a phrase, part of the sentence, etc.). The use of a morphological and syntactic parser makes it possible (i) to disambiguate to a large extent the word selected by the user (and hence to drastically reduce the noise in the response), and (ii) to handle expressions (compounds, collocations, idioms), often a major source of difficulty for non-native readers. The system exists for the following language-pairs: EnglishFrench, French-English, German-French and Italian-French.