Translate apps

Today on the Millcreek Mall Summit bus I had a conversation with a young Japanese visitor who spoke very little English. I was able to help her get to her destination by using Google Translate. You can use it voice to text or text to text. I prefer text to text because it is much more accurate, but if you want to use voice, click on the speaker icons. 

There is an app, but you can also just go to the Google Translate website.
IPhone also has a Translate app, but this is the one I'm familiar with and it's probably the most common. 

Also the Japanese visitor was not able to access network at first and was delighted when I showed her how to use the free Internet on EMTA buses. It was very easy to show her how to do this because even though her phone was in Japanese the icons and the layout is very similar. 

When she got off the bus she turned and bowed to me in gratitude, as is customary, and I smiled and nodded back. 

I have used Google Translate on a number of occasions for bus travel, ethnic stores, offering assistance etc and found it really useful 

Screenshot from our conversation. I typed my comment in English and it translated to Japanese. And then she typed her response in Japanese and it translated  into English.

Google Translate offers almost 250 languages and dialects. In the case of this visitor I pointed to my mouth and said language? And she said Japanese. So I looked it up on the app clicked on Japanese and we went from there!