![]() How good is the app at deciphering and capturing Japanese text?.Similarly, if a native Japanese speaker typed in something, would the English rendering be accurate?.If I typed in English sentences, would they be translated into accurate or understandable Japanese?.These are a few of the criteria I considered when testing the apps: Text translation: I’ve compared these apps by their respective functions. c) how easy and intuitive the apps themselves are to use.b) how useful they are for communicating.a) how practical they are when you’re actually traveling around Japan.– image © Florentyna Leow What makes a useful Japanese translation travel app? Available on iOS and Android.Ī handwritten drinks menu I tried the apps on. This particular free app will require you to watch the occasional video ad (30 seconds at most, and usually about 10 seconds), but it’s a small price to pay. You can either upload a photo with Japanese text from your camera library or take a photo of what you’re looking at, and it will give you a translation superimposed on top of the original text. This is the companion app to Japanese Translation, also by Evolly.app. At this point in time, to our knowledge, this is iOS only. As the name suggests, you won’t need WiFi to use this. In this app, you’ll type in the sentence you need and it spits out a Japanese rendering for you. You will need to be connected to the internet to use this app, but on the bright side, it’s free. If you’re traveling around Asia, you might want to check this out. PapaGo also translates between various Asian languages, including Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, and Chinese. You’ll be passing the phone back and forth between you and another person speaking a different language into the phone. It also allows you to have a simultaneous conversation in two languages using the app. 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.
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