The best app for traveling the world is Google Translate

Harrison Jacobs/Business
Insider

• As Business Insider’s international correspondent, I’ve spent
  the past six months traveling through
  Hong Kong,
  China,
  Singapore,
  Greece,
  Israel, and
  Russia, among other places.
• I use a ton of different apps to make travel as efficient and
  seamless as possible, but, by far the most essential is Google
  Translate.
• Google Translate has a number of features that are
  tailor-made for travelers like its camera function, which
  translate signs instantly, and “conversation mode,” which allows
  you to speak directly into the microphone for real-time
  translated conversations.

As Business
Insider’s international correspondent, I’ve spent the past
six months traveling through Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Greece,
Israel, and Russia, among other places.

That’s a lot of difficult languages to understand. It may
surprise you, but I’m only adept at speaking one language:
English. That’s not for lack of trying — apologies to my high
school Italian teacher.

Nothing can substitute true fluency when traveling, but new and
improving technologies are getting closer to bridging the gap. It
may not be sexy, but Google Translate is the one app I can’t live
without.

Since it was introduced in 2006, Translate has become an
indispensable part of the internet. While many may take to using
it to complete their foreign-language homework (again, apologies
to my high school Italian teacher), it is integrated into so much
of what we do, from Gmail to Chrome and elsewhere. It
effortlessly erases borders of understanding as one navigates
across the internet from Spanish newspaper to Chinese e-commerce
site.

Google

In recent years, Translate’s mobile app, which was first released
in 2010, has worked a similar magic in the real world. Google has
introduced new features designed with travelers in mind and
developed unprecedented translation accuracy thanks to Google’s
game-changing “neural
machine translation” technology.

Translate now has more than 500 million monthly users and
translates over 143 billion words a day.

Earlier this year, Google Translate became the
story of
the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The service’s use
spiked 30% in Russia during the World Cup, according to
Google. A Spanish journalist
used the app to ask a player on France’s team a question
after the team dictated that all questions be in French.

While I was there, fans from all over the world were holding
up smartphones and tablets to each other to carry out
conversations from Russian to English, from Spanish to
Portuguese, and Arabic to French, and every other language pair
you can imagine. I used it to translate signs written in the
Cyrllic alphabet, talk with taxi drivers, figure out what I had
just ordered, and read museum placards.

It was far from the first time Translate has gotten me out
of a jam.

While visiting Japan last year, I became acutely aware of
how amazing the app’s camera function — which
can scan and translate text in real time — is.

I can usually get the gist of signs and labels in Romance
language-speaking countries like Spain or France, thanks to my
mediocre Italian proficiency. Trying to get the gist of Japanese
Kanji characters doesn’t exactly work.

But, as I walked through a supermarket in Tokyo’s Shibuya
neighborhood and encountered unfamiliar food product after
another, the camera translated each item before my eyes. It was
like putting on glasses for the first time.

Harrison Jacobs/Business
Insider

But that only scratches the surface of the app’s potential.

In recent years, Translate has added a
“conversation mode” which allows a user to speak
directly into the microphone for a real-time translation into the
language of one’s choosing. Then the respondent can speak into
the same microphone and translate their speech the other
way. 
The translations can sometimes be
clunky,  but it is more than sufficient to engage in a real
conversation with someone who doesn’t speak your language.

I make a habit of
talking to taxi drivers when traveling. And not just for
recommendations; I ask them about their country. Most have
something insightful to say. Prior to Translate, I had to hope
that whoever’s car I got in had more than a tenuous grasp of
English. In many countries, that’s rarely the case.

Some taxi drivers have wised up to Translate. In Athens, I
met a taxi driver named Ilias who always keeps an iPad open to
the app on his dashboard. Eager to talk to an American, he began
translating himself as soon I entered the cab. Pretty soon we
were going back and forth about Greece’s economic crisis and its
potential solutions. I learned so much from him that it inspired

this story on Greece’s situation. 

Shutterstock

Probably the best aspect of the app is that it works
seamlessly offline.. So long as you download
the requisite language pack, the app will be able to do
everything from conversation mode to the camera function without
internet, which is essential because roaming charges add up quick
while traveling.

While you can’t download every language, there are 60-plus
languages for instant offline translation.

And earlier this month, Google
announced that Translate had added a number of new languages
for full offline use, including Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi,
Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marthi, Nepali, Punjabi,
Tamil, and Telugu. See the full list of available languages
here »

Download Google Translate »