Language Translation Apps

I have just returned from a trip to China. It's been a blast. And quite an experience too. I was to China several times before, but the trips were always fully organized by business partners and we always had a Chinese host with us.

This time it was slightly different, as me and my friend, we did some parts of travel on our own. Nothing really unusual, but without any knowledge of Chinese, things can sometimes be difficult. Such as discussing something with a taxi driver. Or buying medicines at a pharmacy. 

One very useful tip I took from some travelers' forum was to note down the Chinese addresses of hotels, to be able to show them to taxi drivers. This was really helpful and worked.

But some other times we felt really hopeless when a person was trying to tell us something and the language barrier was just impossible to cross. And then we used language translation apps. 

In my case it was Google Translate, with the relevant dictionaries loaded for offline use. Google is generally blocked in China, but works just fine when using a roaming home mobile network. I use Revolut eSIM, as it is super convenient. Just top up straight from the banking app. They use 1Global as the service provider so sometimes it may be confusing if you had a 1Global eSIM installed before (you will find two "1Global" eSIMs. But anyway, with offline languages the network access is not needed.

And it does perfect speech-to-text recognition + translation, so you see the other language result on the screen. It also does in-place image translation which may be helpful when reading medicine leaflets or other instructions (such as restaurant menus).

I remember the first time a language translation app helped me was in 2013 (so 12 years ago) in Vietnam. We booked train tickets for a wrong day and had to rebook. The old Android phone with Google Translate saved the day.

Language translation is BTW very nicely integrated in many Chinese "everything apps" like WeChat and Alipay. Touch and hold a Chinese message in WeChat and it shows up in English. Alipay has a floating "Translate" island which can be used to instantly translate any contents shown on the screen.

This app-language-translation technology is a huge achievement. Many (especially English-speaking) societies do not appreciate that, but once the language becomes a barrier, they are life savers.