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Hands-On Apple 235: Translate App
00:16:08
Your iPhone's Real-Time Language Interpreter
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- [00:00]
Narrator
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Micah Sargent
So good, so good. So good.
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- [01:21]
Micah Sargent
You're standing in a restaurant abroad, lucky you. Squinting at a menu, about to order something you can't pronounce and may regret. Or perhaps you're reading an email from a colleague overseas. Well, you don't need a third party app or a subscription. Your iPhone has had a translator built in since iOS 14 and honestly it's gotten quietly excellent. Today we're putting it to work. Stay tuned.
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Carrington College Announcer
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Micah Sargent
This is Twit.
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State Farm / Sponsor Announcer
Foreign.
- [02:04]
Micah Sargent
Welcome to Hands on Apple. I'm Micah Sargent and today we are taking a look at the Translate app. This is a true translation tool. It's not just some silly app that exists on your phone as a toy. No, you really can use it and it's on more devices than you think. So let's talk about where we can find it. Well, if you are on iOS, you can find it by looking in, well your pre installed apps. That's right, it's pre installed on iPhone, it's pre installed on iPad. Plus there's also a dedicated Translate app on Apple Watch that shipped with WatchOS 11. Now translate, which is what it's called, Simply translate, supports 20 languages in total. Arabic, Mandarin, both mainland and Taiwan, Dutch, French, German. Just some of the languages that are Supported and it does all sorts of forms of translation. One of those forms is text translation where you can simply type or paste text. You can hear pronunciation played back. And so we're going to take a look at how we go about doing this. Well, first we'll pop over to this text and I have some pre written text here in Spanish. I will highlight this text perhaps and I will copy it and paste it into the Spanish area. Whoops. And we see that the translation happens automatically. Where is the nearest train station? I need to get to the airport by 5. So simply pasting that text in, had it pop up and then you can tap next to move on to a new phrase, but also in order to hear how it is pronounced. So being able to hear this text playback. Donde esta train? Mas sercana? Necesito jegar al aropuerto antes de las cinco. And you could then compare. Your pronunciation to that pronunciation as well as the English. Where is the nearest train station? I need to get to the airport before 5. There we go. Now with this, you are able to then tap on any of the words, the specific words that you have here and get a definition of those individual words. You are able to also go through and look at your favorite phrases, your favorite history, which you can do in the top left corner. So at any time, if you want more information, you can simply tap on the arrows here to see the full text and understand the conversation between the two. And then also hitting that favorite icon will add it to your favorites menu. And you can see now that there is this dictionary option that pops up once that's been added to your favorites that lets you look at each word. Estacion, for example, which is a feminine noun, this is the station for a train. It could also refer to a season, so the dry or rainy season, or if something is out of season, fuera de estacion. And in certain places, like Latin America, it could stand for a radio station. Very cool to get to see kind of what each of these words could mean, what they mean in this context, and have a better understanding of them. On top of this, you don't just need to type or paste text in. You can also turn it into a two way conversation if you are in person. I've actually seen this take place before where I was at a. At a. Where was I? I was at the post office and someone needed to communicate with the postal worker and was able to use conversation mode here in order to communicate. So you'll see there's a microphone and essentially what you have is a conversation between two languages. So here I could enter text in English, hello, comma, how are you? Question mark. And then, hola, como estas? Play it back just like that. But I can also hit that microphone, Hola, como estas. And so you see, I said, hola, como estas, meaning hello, how are you? I could also say, hi there. I'm doing well, thank you. Hola, estoy bien, gracias. You get the idea. But that conversation can take place back and forth, listening to the different voices as you carry on. Very handy. Very nice to see this kind of this back and forth. And what's pretty cool about this is that you can actually change the views from side by side to face to face. So that way if we have the phone sitting on the table, the person on the other side could look down and see the text on that side in Spanish, I can look down on my side and see the text in English. And of course those can switch. So being able to switch between these modes is really handy. Between again, face to face and side by side. Now in this section you'll also see that you have some other options, including being able to move through auto translation where it can fully listen to the microphone and begin to translate as you are as you're speaking, but also detect language, which makes it so that even if you're not sure what language the other person is speaking, this will try to pick up on it and give you that information as well. Apple Watch also has a conversation mode that makes it possible for you to do the same. Just holding out your Apple Watch, if you don't want to pull out the phone and have them both, you know, have it resting there on the table. Or if that feels a little bit intimidating.
- [08:45]
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- [09:20]
Micah Sargent
You could say that again.
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- [09:30]
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- [09:34]
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- [09:40]
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- [10:12]
Micah Sargent
so that's conversation mode. One of my favorite modes is the camera mode because this lets you point your phone your phone camera at menus, at signs at labels and get instant text recognition, translation and overlay. So it does this by looking at the view and perhaps you have whoops, we'll hit the camera mode. Perhaps you have a sign in front of you and we're no, we know we're translating here from Spanish to English, so let's switch. Well, that's German, but we'll get to that in a second. Let's choose Spanish and we will convert Spanish to English. And I've got a sign here that says cuidado piso mojaro. And that is caution wet floor. Now let's check out the German. It says. Well, actually I'm not very good at pronouncing German to be honest with you. So I know, Bitte, please keep this door closed is the idea for this one. Now that of course is one way of doing it where the text will pop up on screen but you can also take a photo and that way it can kind of capture that view and lock things in. This is not just something that is limited to being able to make to take photos here. You can also pull photos from your photo library. And so if there was an opportunity where you took a photo of something in a different language at one point and you wanted to have your app translated later, then you can do that as well. It also works in Safari, which is quite nice. If you are visiting a web page that is in a different language, Safari will recognize that and offer to translate it. But here's the thing, we don't need to even open the Translate app because we are able to select text in any of the apps system wide and we can with this context menu hit the right arrow and choose Translate and there we can see the translation. Hello Maika, thank you for your message. Thursday's meeting has been changed to three in the afternoon. Does that time work for you? If not, we can look for another time next week. Regards, Carmen. Very cool that you can Then replace the translation with the English. You can copy the translation, obviously. Add this to Favorites so you could go back and look at the different words or open it fully in the Translate menu. Let's see what it does with the German, since it didn't seem to be as good with the German as it was with the Spanish. Or maybe my original sign wasn't as good. This says hi Micah, thank you for your message. The meeting on Thursday has been postponed to 3pm does that suit you? If not, we can find another date next week. Best regards, Stefan, and once again able to be replaced with the translation. Now you'll note that it automatically detected the language there as German. It did not need me to tell it that it was German in the first place. Very nice to be able to do that. Now, that said, it's important to note that as of now, while on your iPhone and your iPad, you have this Translate app. You don't have that on the Mac. Mostly that's because of the system wide translation features, which would give you the ability to translate something from a different language without needing to pull open a Translate app. So simply right clicking on selected text and choosing Translate will do the same as what we're doing here on your phone or on an iPad. One last thing that I want to tell you about. You don't actually have to be online connected to the Internet in order to make use of the Translate app. You can download language packs that will allow you to to do your translations on device and not even need a connection to the Internet. Now, storage packs do take up space. These language packs rather do take up storage space. And so when you're done with one, you may want to remove it. But it's a good idea that before you take a trip, download the languages that you're going to be using. Try out a conversation, make sure that it works, favorite your key phrases, hold onto those. But I'll show you how we get these languages added to our Translate app. In the top right corner of the main Translate page, my favorite button, three dots. We can tap on that and choose languages. And right now you'll note that I have downloaded three languages to this phone. English, us, German and Spanish. If I want to add more, I look for the languages that are available for download, including the different versions. Dutch, English, uk, Indonesian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, et cetera, et cetera. Simply tapping on one of those will make it available to download or will start the download and once it's done, it's available offline. If I hit the edit button in the top left hand corner. That's how I can remove languages that I don't need anymore. So once you're done in that country, perhaps you want to remove it. But if you've got storage space, hey, why not make use of it? It's all right there and able to be accessed as needed. The one last thing I'll say, if you hit those three dots again, you choose languages. Note below the available offline languages, there's an option to tap on the Settings app. This brings you into the settings for Translate and you'll note that there's also a choice to change the translation app that you use. So this is a change to the default translation app, which is quite nice if you have a third party, one that you enjoy more here. You can also delete languages that you don't want anymore saved offline. But last but not least, the bottom option here is on device mode. And what this does is it forces the system to always translate languages on device instead of doing online translations. That is a privacy preserving option. It is also an option that makes it so that you don't have to go, you don't have to find a connection to the Internet in order to use it. But as it is noted here in the Translate section, it may mean that you are foregoing accuracy for the sake of doing it on device. So just bear that in mind if you choose to do completely on device translations, privacy is the thing that you get. Accuracy is perhaps the thing that you lose. So I've been trying to give everyone homework after we kind of COVID a topic. So I do have some homework for you. Should you like to give this a go, download one of the language packs and then try that camera translation on something that you have around the house. Or if you don't have something in a different language around the house, perhaps you look something up. Basically anything. Yeah. Or you could even have it translate from English to a different language, hold it up that way and see how it might look so you know you don't need to then go look for something afterwards. If you're running iOS 26 and you have an Apple intelligence capable iPhone, be aware that there's actually a whole second layer to the translation story called live translation that lives inside the phone messages, FaceTime, even AirPods. And that may just be a future episode of Hands on Apple. But that covers the Translate app for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I appreciate you for checking out this show every week, sharing it with your friends and making sure that you have your questions answered. HOA TV is how you can get in touch or Micahit TV. And hey, don't forget to join our club. TWiT TV. ClubTWiT is where you get to sign up $10 a month, $120 a year. You get lots of cool benefits. You can learn more about Those@Twit TV ClubTwit. I'll catch you next week for another episode of Hands on Apple. Bye Bye.
- [18:56]
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