Perhaps its smartest feature is receipt translation, which uses your phone’s camera to convert snapshots of sales slips and dinner tallies into the language of your choice; it saves the translated versions as PDFs that you can easily add to expense reports. (In such credit card-averse countries as Japan, where cash receipts are also spelled out in kanji, this is immensely helpful.) Need to do something more complicated, such as change a train reservation or explain a food allergy? Avail yourself of TripLingo’s live translator service, which gets an actual human translator on the line for $3.50 per minute.
Caveat: Most of the basic features are free, but some unique premium features require a $20 per month subscription, including language lessons, custom phrase books, and one live translation every 30 days.
Best for Big Groups
Microsoft Translator
Why we like it: Compared to other tech juggernauts, Microsoft offers a small number of languages—a little more than 60 in total. Still, it stands out for its ability to translate multiple tongues simultaneously, all as part of a single conversation. Whether that’s in a boardroom with executives from a company’s six regional offices or in a restaurant with global patrons and communal tables, the app will quickly translate everyone’s thoughts for each participant on their respective phones.
In Rome, this was a nice way to get menu recommendations from, and swap stories with, other guests at the bar; the app was surprisingly accurate and even offered practical phrasebooks for more intimate situations. Best of all? It’s free.
Caveat: Only 40 of the app’s languages are available offline.
Best for Trips to Asia
Waygo
Why we like it: In places where Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji, and Korean hanja characters are used, Waygo is indispensable. Its developers are the pioneers and leaders of visual character translation; the four-year-old app is uniquely capable of interpreting sentences, whether they’re displayed vertically or horizontally, and it can translate any image from your camera roll.
Those qualities might come in handy when deciphering kanji-based descriptions at the recently reopened Teien Museum in Tokyo or when shopping for cold medicine in Seoul. As for translation apps that can be overly literal in the face of idiomatic phrases? Waygo has a unique feature, exclusively for food, that offers up images of your translated word or phrase alongside the text, so you know that "strawberry moving perry"—as translated from Japanese into English—is really just a glass of juice. Bonus: Most of Waygo’s features are offline by default, so there’s no need to worry about roaming overages. All this makes it well worth the price tag, which starts at $7.99.
Why we like it: As with any type of expertise, Waygo’s algorithms are highly specialized for use in Asia. If its developers could expand to other non-Roman alphabet languages such as Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Russian, we’d be happy to pay even more for it.