This does rely on some prior knowledge of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean characters. This app allows you to write or ‘draw’ kanji characters onto the screen. It’s available on iOS and Android (but of course) and is free for use. This is then read out to you in the target language.

Google Translate records and renders your words into text, then produces a translation. There’s also an option to speak into the phone’s inbuilt microphone.

You can also type in English text that will be translated into Japanese (or other languages) and vice versa. 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.

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