Traveling to a foreign country where they don’t speak English can be very stressful. Even though English has become a world trade language there are still a lot of places where it isn’t widely spoken. Nowhere is that more true than in China. There aren’t many places in the world that are less influenced by western culture than China, particularly in language. Recently on a trip to China we were able to put google translate to the test and see exactly how powerful this tool can be when traveling in a place where no one speaks English.
If you’ve never used it before or don’t know what it is here is a brief summery: It is an app that is easily downloaded onto your phone. You have the ability to select languages to translate into your native tongue. You can do this online by taking pictures or submitting text or you can do it offline by downloading language packs and letting the program work. We tried both ways in China.
Online voice and text translations:
- The ability to submit text and voice to text to google servers for translation
- more accurate than the downloaded file translations
- uses data (which in China is a problem as they block google products)
- ‘Listens’ in real time to hear the language, convert it into text, send it to servers and bring back a translation
- If data isn’t enabled you can lose the translation all together.
- Conversation mode allows you and someone else speaking in different languages to converse. It isn’t fast nor is it totally accurate but you can figure out what is bring said, and that is what your after.
Downloaded voice and text translations:
- real time voice and text translations
- less accurate than submitting information but still functional
- often difficult to figure out what is meant as the translation tends to be literal instead of conversational.. for example while trying to order a drink at a bar the translation program came back to us asking if we wanted to ‘try chicken butts instead of wine.’
- the conversational mode takes some patients to work, and both parties working together; but it does work, and work pretty well.
Online picture submission:
- After focusing your camera on a word or phrases you can submit a picture to google for translation.
- Allows you to select what is to be translated.
- Pretty accurate in the translation
- Won’t work without data enabled which again can be an issue in China.
Real time picture translation:
- Allows you to hold your camera up to something and let google try to translate it real time.
- Words magically appear before your eyes
- Not always super accurate
- A very fun way of looking through menus and museums.
- works great for reading street signs
- a very literal translation, so it can be clunky and difficult to understand at times.
Conclusions
Google translate has come a long way in allowing people to easily understand languages that are completely foreign to them. It isn’t perfect. It isn’t always accurate. It isn’t always easy to use. That being said it is a very valuable tool. Although the translations both ways were sometimes difficult to understand, with a little bit of thought and work they were always figured out. As you can see from the pictures, the translations are literal but accurate mostly. Overall we were quite impressed with this app and found it very useful for getting around and figuring things out. Particularly for signs and menus. It often times felt like having a secrete decoder ring for the Chinese print and language. So it was quite fun to use!