Before you head to foreign climes for your holidays this year it's worth your while downloading Google Translate. For those who have never used this smartphone app, it has a great instant camera translation feature.
Fire up the app, tap on the camera option and point the phone at a road sign en Français or a menu auf Deutsch and it will blur and overlay the text with an English translation in real time.
If you’re not sure what language you’re looking at it then set to “detect language”. The app works well enough with small chunks of text but struggles with anything more so it’s not going to magically transform the front page of La Stampa for a morning perusal with espresso on the side.
Latest update
The latest update makes Google Translate even more attractive: it now has offline mode to avoid eating up data while roaming.
It has also, wisely, expanded camera translation beyond various languages to English only so you can now translate from any one of the 88 supported languages to another.
And if you plan to visit the Gaeltacht, Irish is also included. Go hiontach ar fad!
