PapaGoĭeveloped by Naver, this app does text, voice, and photo translation. I tested this with a free trial of the paid version. As a bonus, it works offline once you’ve downloaded the requisite language packs. While you can translate between English and Japanese, there are around 40 language pairs available. This app offers text, voice, and photo translation. The app limits you to 10 free translations a day beyond this, you’ll need to purchase the app. You are also able to hold the phone up to a given text or set of words and have Waygo render a translation. This does rely on some prior knowledge of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean characters. This app allows you to write or ‘draw’ kanji characters onto the screen. It’s available on iOS and Android (but of course) and is free for use. This is then read out to you in the target language. Google Translate records and renders your words into text, then produces a translation. There’s also an option to speak into the phone’s inbuilt microphone. You can also type in English text that will be translated into Japanese (or other languages) and vice versa. Using this app, you point your phone camera at the text you want to read, and the optical character recognition (OCR) technology “reads” the text and displays the translation directly on your phone screen, displacing the original text. There are three main parts to this app: photo, voice, and text translation. In no particular order, these are the apps I tested: 1. These were downloaded from the App Store on an iPhone, though some of these will also be available on Android. I took six translation apps out into the Tokyo wilderness for a spin. For this reason, I didn’t include grammar-focused Japanese-learning apps, ‘phrasebook’ apps, or dictionary apps. The goal was to find useful, intuitive apps that non-Japanese speakers could use to communicate with locals, figure out what’s what, and generally get around. There are quite literally hundreds of translation apps out there. – image © Florentyna Leow Japanese–English and English–Japanese Translation Apps for iPhones Spoiler: It’s not 100% accurate, but out of all the apps I tested, Photo Translator performed best with handwritten menus. Test-driving translation apps for Japan travel.Japanese–English and English–Japanese Translation Apps for iPhones.This guide contains the following sections:

By ‘best’ we mean useful and practical – translation apps are never 100% accurate, but they’re fantastic for breaking down those language barriers. In this guide, we show you some of the best translation apps out there for traveling in Japan. Instead, you can use today’s modern equivalent on your smartphone to communicate with locals: a translation app. One of the most intimidating things about traveling somewhere new like Japan used to be language barriers – being unable to communicate your needs and wants to people, or indeed understand anything they were saying to you.įortunately, you won’t need to slip Douglas Adams’ small, yellow, leech-like Babel Fish into your ear to understand what anyone’s saying on your travels.

Itranslate app reviews