Simultaneous Chinese Interpreter |Chinese Interpreter |Chinese Translator |Mandarin Interpreter
Chinese is the hardest language to read in the world. Chinese may be a challenge, but it’s not one that modern day learners of Chinese can’t handle.
An outstanding Chinese translation app can serve as a much-needed lifesaver.
In the past, translating unknown Chinese words was a time consuming process involving tome-like dictionaries.
Nowadays learners have a wide range of online translation apps available for easy use. Don’t even think about those musty old books—your smartphone holds the key to swift, precise translation.
Different Types of Chinese Translation Apps
There’s no one way to translate Chinese/Mandarin Language. There are 4 main types of Chinese translation apps out there in the digital marketplace.
Online Translators
The first and most familiar kind of translation app is the kind which any learner will encounter while surfing the next. These are online, browser-based translators.
Sites like Google Translator and Bing Translator can very rapidly translate whole passages of Chinese into comprehensible English. However, the key word here is comprehensible. While these so-called “machine translation” apps have come a long way in recent years, they still make numerous grammatical errors and syntax comes out rather awkward. Furthermore, specific to Chinese, these programs often horribly mistranslate complex chengyu idioms (which makes sense, because the meaning lies in the connotation and history of these phrases).
The reason to use an online, browser-based translator is for translating larger passages. You can often produce a translation that’s halfway decent and catches the gist of each sentence. Then all you have to do is go in and do a little clean up to make sentences sound natural and correct mistakes.
Instant Character Translation
Online translators have been around for along time, but new mobile apps have taken them to a whole new level. Using smartphone cameras, this kind of app uses a technology called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to identify all Chinese characters within a given field of view. Then, this character data is instantly translated by the app (with the assistance of online, cloud-based translating tech) into readable English.
Word Dictionaries
Of course, most translation software, whether on a computer or a smartphone, only functions as a translator for a large portion of text. Should a learner want to go deep, rather than broad, they would be better served by a word dictionary translator. These applications allow a user to look up individual words or characters, and understand not just a single possible reading of them, but rather all possible readings and uses.
Voice Translation
Similar to instant character translation, voice translation is the most technically ambitious kind of translation app currently available. Such apps promise to be able to receive Chinese audio as input, semantically understand the meaning behind what was said, translate it into English and then read it out. Using devices with large amounts of processing power, backed with cloud-networking, these apps enable near real-time voice communication even if you don’t speak a word of Chinese.
Online Translators: Google Translate
While it has a rather bad reputation for producing humorous errors, Google Translate is still probably the best out there. It can rapidly translate huge chunks of texts, and even translates entire websites through a Chrome plugin. While the resulting translations are far from perfect, it’s still able to produce generally comprehensible text that has good understanding of the grammatical semantics of Chinese and English.
What’s more, this online application is constantly improving. Users are able to confirm whether a given translation was of good quality, and repeated confirmations “teach” the program how to translate better, through a process called Machine Learning. While competitors like Bing Translator use an identical approach, Google has more users and thus its software can learn and improve faster.
Instant Character Translation: Waygo
Instant character recognition and translation is still a developing translation niche. This being said, Waygo, an app available for Android and iOS smartphones, is truly a feat of software engineering. It’s a great piece of technology.
The app is able to translate Chinese text in real time, using a smartphone camera, into readable English. While you might think that this app requires a constant internet connection to be operational, you would be wrong. Almost all of Waygo’s core functionality can be used offline, making it especially useful for translation on the fly, in regions which have only very poor mobile internet connectivity.
Word Dictionary: Pleco
As you progress through learning Chinese, you probably won’t need to be translating whole paragraphs, or even sentences any more, but rather tricky words and characters. For this, a learner would do well to download Pleco.
Also available for free from the Android and iOS app stores, this app is packed full of useful character translation features. However, what really sets it apart from the competition is the large number of options it gives for users to look up unknown characters. Stroke order, pinyin, touch pad drawing and OCR are all able to be used, allowing a learner to quickly translate a never-before-seen word.
Voice Translation: TBD
Unlike the other categories of translation, real-time voice translation is still a very new field. As such, there are very few applications out there which can offer useful functionality. This being said, there are some promising projects which could see this kind of translation break into the mainstream in the next few years.
The most interesting of these is Skype Translator, a project currently being developed by Microsoft. This advanced technology promises to allow for Skype video calls with people who speak Mandarin, with both sides’ words being actively translated via cloud software.