In this paper, we propose the mobile edge computing based latency aware OCR and realtime English translation (MEC‐Trans) for smart cities. MEC‐Trans monitors the local resource status of the edge platform and the network status from the edge to the cloud in real time. Based on this, it adopts an intelligent decision mechanism driven by user experience. It offloads some computation to the edge and dynamically reduces the network transmission data amount. In this way a relatively stable quality of user experience can be guaranteed.