I traveled the world for 6 months, and here's the single best app I couldn't live without

Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

• As Business Insider's international correspondent, I've spent the past six months traveling through Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Greece, Israel, and Russia, among other places.
• I use a ton of different apps to make travel as efficient and seamless as possible, but, by far the most essential is Google Translate.
• Google Translate has a number of features that are tailor-made for travelers like its camera function, which translate signs instantly, and "conversation mode," which allows you to speak directly into the microphone for real-time translated conversations.

As Business Insider's international correspondent, I've spent the past six months traveling through Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Greece, Israel, and Russia, among other places.

That's a lot of difficult languages to understand. It may surprise you, but I'm only adept at speaking one language: English. That's not for lack of trying - apologies to my high school Italian teacher.

Nothing can substitute true fluency when traveling, but new and improving technologies are getting closer to bridging the gap. It may not be sexy, but Google Translate is the one app I can't live without.

Since it was introduced in 2006, Translate has become an indispensable part of the internet. While many may take to using it to complete their foreign-language homework (again, apologies to my high school Italian teacher), it is integrated into so much of what we do, from Gmail to Chrome and elsewhere. It effortlessly erases borders of understanding as one navigates across the internet from Spanish newspaper to Chinese e-commerce site.

Google

In recent years, Translate's mobile app, which was first released in 2010, has worked a similar magic in the real world. Google has introduced new features designed with travelers in mind and developed unprecedented translation accuracy thanks to Google's game-changing "neural machine translation" technology.

Translate now has more than 500 million monthly users and translates over 143 billion words a day.

Earlier this year, Google Translate became the story of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The service's use spiked 30% in Russia during the World Cup, according to Google. A Spanish journalist used the app to ask a player on France's team a question after the team dictated that all questions be in French.

While I was there, fans from all over the world were holding up smartphones and tablets to each other to carry out conversations from Russian to English, from Spanish to Portuguese, and Arabic to French, and every other language pair you can imagine. I used it to translate signs written in the Cyrllic alphabet, talk with taxi drivers, figure out what I had just ordered, and read museum placards.

It was far from the first time Translate has gotten me out of a jam.

While visiting Japan last year, I became acutely aware of how amazing the app's camera function - which can scan and translate text in real time - is.

I can usually get the gist of signs and labels in Romance language-speaking countries like Spain or France, thanks to my mediocre Italian proficiency. Trying to get the gist of Japanese Kanji characters doesn't exactly work.

But, as I walked through a supermarket in Tokyo's Shibuya neighborhood and encountered unfamiliar food product after another, the camera translated each item before my eyes. It was like putting on glasses for the first time.

Harrison Jacobs/Business Insider

But that only scratches the surface of the app's potential.

In recent years, Translate has added a "conversation mode" which allows a user to speak directly into the microphone for a real-time translation into the language of one's choosing. Then the respondent can speak into the same microphone and translate their speech the other way. The translations can sometimes be clunky, but it is more than sufficient to engage in a real conversation with someone who doesn't speak your language.

I make a habit of talking to taxi drivers when traveling. And not just for recommendations; I ask them about their country. Most have something insightful to say. Prior to Translate, I had to hope that whoever's car I got in had more than a tenuous grasp of English. In many countries, that's rarely the case.

Some taxi drivers have wised up to Translate. In Athens, I met a taxi driver named Ilias who always keeps an iPad open to the app on his dashboard. Eager to talk to an American, he began translating himself as soon I entered the cab. Pretty soon we were going back and forth about Greece's economic crisis and its potential solutions. I learned so much from him that it inspired this story on Greece's situation.

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Probably the best aspect of the app is that it works seamlessly offline.. So long as you download the requisite language pack, the app will be able to do everything from conversation mode to the camera function without internet, which is essential because roaming charges add up quick while traveling.

While you can't download every language, there are 60-plus languages for instant offline translation.

And earlier this month, Google announced that Translate had added a number of new languages for full offline use, including Arabic, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marthi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, and Telugu. See the full list of available languages here »

Download Google Translate »