7 Best Translator Apps 2024
Language is never a barrier as long as you have a smartphone. With the power of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning integration, now smartphones can efficiently translate with zero error, and there are numerous translation apps tailored to meet specific translation needs. These apps are available for Android and iOS. Regardless of whether you are a business traveler, on vacation, or you’re lying under the covers at home having a bilingual conversation, with these translation apps, you can read, write and speak in over 100 languages, anywhere in the world.
Google translate
Google Translate helps you read or communicate in up to 103 languages with several features, including instant camera translation, a phrasebook with an SMS translator, text-recognition features, and even audio recordings of translated words and sentences. It's a great travel tool for when you venture somewhere you don't speak the language, especially since the introduction of its offline features, available for up to 54 languages.
One particularly great feature is Conversation mode. This lets you carry on a free-flowing back-and-forth conversation in which two or more people can speak naturally, and the app continues to listen and translate. It’s like having an interpreter standing right beside you. You don't even need to tap the screen to keep speaking because the app automatically recognizes someone talking, translates the phrase, speaks it out loud, and then goes back to listening for the next translation.
iTranslate Translator
iTranslate is a productivity app that readily translates websites, images, text, and voice. The app translates across over 100 languages, including Arabic, Czech, Chinese, Dutch, German, Spanish, Zulu, and Vietnamese. You can either type via text or make use of the app's voice recognition software, select the language, or use automatic language detection. All translations appear in both written form and audio. With Lens, you can take a picture of the text for automatic translation of words, phrases, signs, menus, and chunks of text, including book passages or articles. If you are trying to find the word for a physical object in another language, you can use the Lens feature to determine the translation based on an image. It also contains a phrasebook with a collection of commonly used words organized by category. The app can function offline.
Mate
With Mate, the keyword is seamless. Designed to make language translation as easy and fluid as possible, Mate is one of the best translation apps that allows you to translate across over 103 languages on your iPhone readily. The app is designed to make language translation as seamless as it can be. Its speech translator makes communication with foreign-language speakers fluid. It also features a phrasebook that can be synced across devices, phonetic transcriptions, as well as Safari, iMessage, and Share extensions which allow you to translate anywhere at all on your iPhone, including Safari, iMessage, PDFs, notes, etc. The app is available for the monthly purchase of $9.99 after a 7-day free trial.
Microsoft Translator
Microsoft Translate is a free translation app that supports over 50 languages. While this is much less than the earlier translation apps, it is a fair number. MS translator does a much better job of pronouncing words or phrases by slowing it down for each retry. Also, when translating through image capture, it places the words in the original image, making it easier to know where each sentence starts and stops. The app allows translation in other apps through the context menu translation. Up to 12 languages are supported for offline use, much less than Google Translate's 54. Also, it doesn’t support conversational translation. It, however, supports a split-screen mode for two participants having a bilingual conversation.
TextGrabber
TextGrabber makes it easy to identify text by simply translating when you point your mobile opine at a printed text. What's more, it captures and recognizes it online without any internet connection. This real-time recognition mode identifies and translates text in over 60 languages, from documents and any surface at all. With an internet connection, it can do all these in over 100 languages, and all captured text can either be edited, stored, deleted, or merged into the notes list. You can also send the recognized text via email or SMS, and all scanned links, email addresses, and opine numbers are clickable. The app is very easy to use and highly efficient. However, the paid license is bi-monthly, which isn't nearly enough time to fully uncover all that the app can do.
Waygo
Waygo aims at ensuring you experience new languages like a local, utilizing a combination of Optical Character Recognition and machine translation to translates Chinese, Japanese & Korean characters into English text. It does this by seeing images, finding the relevant text, and finally creating sensible phrases. The beautiful thing is that Waygo does not require an internet connection to operate. With Waygo, you can see pictures of the food dish you are translating (Chinese only). You can also see and hear the pronunciation of the words. All you need to do is to point and translate foreign text to English. You can share your translations through SMS, Facebook, Twitter, and Email.
Naver Papago
Whatever your translation needs during your travels, bring along Papago, a smart parrot who can translate multiple languages for you. Naver Papago Translate is a translation app supporting 13 languages: Korean, Japanese, English, Chinese (Simplified/Traditional), Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, and German. Naver Papago offers a real-time translation of both phrases and voice. It also allows for bilingual conversations when speaking with a foreigner. One great feature is its dictionary information provided for you to check more meanings.