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.

Translate between up to 133 languages.Six translation apps for Japan travel.

Google english japanese translator