You just never know when you’re going to need something translated. “Not me,” you scoff. “I tend to stay pretty close to home so why on earth would I ever need something translated?”

That’s what I used to think – at least until a couple weeks ago when a teacher asked me if I could help translate an article about the Boston Tea Party for a new student who spoke only French. Since my ability to speak the language begins and ends with “Bonjour,” I mumbled something to the effect of, “OK, I think Google has a translation feature.” It turned out that it does — actually it turns out there are a bunch of apps available — and the day was saved.

My point is, you never know when you might find yourself in need of a little translation help – even if you hardly ever venture far from home. So, without further ado (or is that adieu?), let’s take a quick look at some of the more popular translation apps, both good and bad.

Travelandleisure.com’s article about “The best translation apps for travelers” contains several suggestions, such as Google Translate, which the website says “will generate a written translation for anything that you type, speak, photograph, or draw on your touch screen.” It does have trouble with translating some Asian characters though. It can translate 133 languages, 70 of them in voice translations.

Another app, iTranslate, lets you slow down or speed up audio playback, allowing you to work on your pronunciation, but it struggled with some phonetic spellings for languages with different alphabets, according to Travelandleisure.com. It can tackle 100 languages, with 38 offering voice translations.

If you need to translate anything written in Chinese, Japanese or Korean, Travelandleisure.com says the app Waygo is the way to go.

In its rundown of “Which translation app should you use?” Wired.com found the user interface of Google Translate “easily more complex” when compared to Apple and Microsoft’s offerings,” giving the app a score of 7 out of 10.

Translate iOS (iPhone Operating System) is ”pretty good at nailing sentence structure,” says Wired, “but it could often present some confusing results from having a vocabulary that is too general.” (7/10).

Wired.com goes on to point out that “an outdated look doesn’t hinder (the) fully featured (Microsoft Translator) app,” adding that it has “a user interface that is simple enough for everyone, including those who may not be all that smartphone savvy.” (8/10). OK, sign me up!

The site also says the app SayHi has “some awkward design choices but is great for text translation.” (5/10).

All this talk about translation apps started me wondering about the differences between “translation” and “interpretation.” According to Babbel.com, human “interpreters work with spoken or signed words, while translators work with written words.” Of course there’s a lot more to it than that, but this definition gets the point across without you having to listen to me get up on my soapbox and go on and on about the whole thing. And besides, we’re not dealing with human translators here but with translation devices, right?

We’ve already seen that not all translation devices are created equal, in fact there are some that are even bad – intentionally.

Yup, for example, according to Google Workspace there’s an app called Bad Translator, which it says “is a simple add-on that abuses Google Translate by force-feeding your text through the Translate algorithm into a random language multiple times, and then back to your language. You can expect anything from awkward phrasing to complete and total nonsense depending on your selected distortion level as well as pure chance.”

No offense, Bad Translator, but I really don’t need you. If I want a translation of complete and total nonsense that’s based on pure chance, I can do that quite well on my own, thank you very much.

Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.

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