In the old days (by which I mean 15 years ago), when I traveled internationally it was challenging. There wasn’t any Wi-Fi and there weren’t any apps to translate signs, menus, objects, or people. Now there’s a plethora of apps and tools, and one of the coolest is Snap & Translate ($9.99 for iOS). It makes translation faster and easier than ever before because to use it, all you have to do is take a picture! You can literally take a picture of an object, let the app recognize what it is, and learn the translation. You can also take a photo of printed text and the app will scan and translate it for you in seconds!
You can translate between 46 languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, and Welsh!
It’s great for navigating unfamiliar cities, airports and stations; reading menus and recipes, books and articles, instructions and manuals; communicating with foreigners in their language; and even learning new languages by simply taking pictures of the surrounding area.
How the object mode works:
- Take a picture
- See the name of the object in your photo
- Get the translation into the language you’ve chosen
- Listen to the pronunciation, copy and share the translation anywhere
How the text mode works:
- Take a picture of printed text
- See the text recognized and translated into the chosen language
- Listen to the pronunciation, copy and share the translation anywhere
