Chinese Translation Apps for Chinese Learners
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.
Best Chinese Translation Apps
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 vCharacter Translaton
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.
