[em500]

I don't think offline translation kicks in automatically when you have a bad (as opposed to no) connection. You can easily verify that it can translate without any connection (both on iOS and Android) by downloading the language and putting the phone in airplane mode. (At least, the basic text translation works fine. The more advanced features, such as speech and image translation, don't.)

Also, Microsoft's Translator app can do the same (offline translation for text) and IME is about on par with Google).

[midoridensha]

>Also, Microsoft's Translator app can do the same (offline translation for text) and IME is about on par with Google)

Interesting, I'll have to try this.

Well, I tried installing the app and using image translate mode on some Japanese and the results were not very good, not nearly as good as Google Translate. I'll try it out later with regular text.

I also looked at the phrasebook feature. That's a pretty neat idea actually. However, for some really strange reason it defaulted to showing me phrases in Spanish. I have no idea why it thinks I would want to speak Spanish (My system language is English, and I live in Japan, so obviously I want to convert to Japanese. No one speaks Spanish here.)

[traceroute66]

> using image translate mode on some Japanese and the results were not very good,

I think the honest truth is that Japanese is the ultimate challenge of any translation too.

My Japanese friends tell me that DeepL is about as close as you will ever get to a passable translation quality.

But DeepL does not do image translation.

On a recent trip to Japan I installed six image translation apps on my phone.

None were perfect, I found Naver Papago to be the most consistently usable (although it was far from perfect).

Interesting observations I made during the extensive testing:

     1) The majority of image translation apps don't like Japanese when written vertically, I found they perform best with horizontally written Japanese.
     2) All image translation apps *REALLY* don't like hand-written Japanese.  Some of them *MIGHT* translate *SOME* of the text. But really all of them only really work consistently with machine-printed text.

[Scoundreller]

The other issue with deepl is that it has limited language pairs. I wonder what limits it. The language I'd like should have enough of a corpus of text.