In recent years with the rapidly growth of smart phones/devices, augmented reality becomes part of many mobile applications. For instance, we can cite the translation applications. This paper reports on a review of literature on augmented reality text translation. The main components of any augmented reality translation application are: text detection, text extraction and text translation. Therefore the factors considered in our study include: the used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for text extraction, the used technique/algorithm for detecting the text, the used API's for text translation, the used tools in developing these applications and used programming language(s), the application supporting platform(s), the supported translation languages, the dataset used for evaluating the system and lastly, the results of the experiments. In total, 12 studies published between 1998 and 2016 were analyzed. The main findings from this review provide the current state of the art on research in augmented reality in text translation. Furthermore, the paper permits to set up the ways towards developing an android mobile application for real time Arabic text translation. Although the enrichment and the integration of the new technologies in the translation process, the existing applications are still limited to few number of languages. Arabic language is one of those not yet supported.