How to use your phone’s camera to translate anything

Phone cameras can translate foreign text in seconds, making signs and other everyday writing easier to understand while travelling. The article explains that Google Translate, Google Lens and the iPhone camera’s Live Text feature offer different ways to do this.

Google Translate’s camera mode supports hundreds of languages, can detect an unknown source language and can work offline if languages are downloaded in advance. The author says it can struggle with Vietnamese diacritics and brief or informal menu wording; AI apps such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude may handle context better, but require uploading an image and an internet connection, and can have image limits.