Google Translate Word Lens: Translate Japanese & Other Languages to English Offline Instantly Using Camera When You Travel

Lost in Translation no more with Word Lens in Japanese

If you don’t speak Japanese, Tokyo can be a confusing and sometimes daunting place to visit. Even if you make it through the complex subway system, you’ll be faced by street signs, menus or products on supermarket shelves that are only in Japanese.

With Word Lens now available in Japanese, you’ll never have to worry about taking a wrong turn on a busy Shibuya street or ordering something you wouldn’t normally eat.

The Google Translate app already lets you snap a photo of Japanese text and get a translation for it in English. But it’s a whole lot more convenient if you can just point your camera and instantly translate text on the go. With Word Lens, you just need to fire up the Translate app, point your camera at the Japanese text, and the English translations will appear overlaid on your screen—even if you don’t have an Internet or data connection. It’s every savvy traveller’s dream!

To turn your smartphone into a powerful instant translation tool for English to Japanese (and vice versa), all you need to do is download the Google Translate app, either on Android or iOS.

Google Translate App World Lens Supported Languages

  1. English
  2. Bulgarian
  3. Catalan
  4. Croatian
  5. Czech
  6. Danish
  7. Dutch
  8. Filipino
  9. Finnish
  10. French
  11. German
  12. Hindi (one-way translation)
  13. Hungarian
  14. Indonesian
  15. Italian
  16. Japanese
  17. Lithuanian
  18. Norwegian
  19. Polish
  20. Portuguese
  21. Romanian
  22. Russian
  23. Slovak
  24. Spanish
  25. Swedish
  26. Thai (one-way translation)
  27. Turkish
  28. Ukrainian

You can also take pictures of the text and have it translated across a total of 37 languages. Some of the “Word Lens” languages may require you to download a translation package file, which has a size of about 2-3 megabytes.