If you travel a lot, you’ll know that one of the biggest challenges is communicating in countries that don’t natively speak your primary language. Many countries adopt English as their second language, and while some tourist spots have a few people who can speak English, these are few and far between.
For most travelers, Google Translate is the go-to provider of all translation services. It supports over 200 languages, including text and voice input, and works well anywhere you are. However, there is one inherent problem with Google Translate: it’s provided by Google, and therefore, it may not work in certain countries where Google is banned.
The largest of these is China, and while you can’t use Google services at all, at least not without a VPN, alternative translation platforms are available. The translator app on the iPhone and an alternative powered by Microsoft work fairly well, but on my recent trip, I discovered a much better alternative. Here’s the best AI translator I’ve used on a phone, and why.
Meet the Oppo Find X8 Ultra
I spent the last two weeks in China, meeting with Oppo, attending the launch of the Find X8 Ultra, and meeting with various companies and individuals throughout Shenzhen. From traveling via Didi — China’s answer to Uber — to eating in restaurants, buying some of the best Chinese phones, to hosting business meetings, I’ve been immersed in the Chinese language. There’s only one problem: I don’t speak Mandarin.
Enter the Oppo Find X8 Ultra, and my favorite implementation of a shortcut button on a phone. Unlike some languages, where you can guess the meaning of a word by its appearance, I am unable to read Mandarin.
The translation app on the Find X8 Ultra solves this by letting you either translate a photo or a screenshot of what’s on-screen at the moment. Sadly, it doesn’t have an alternative to Gemini Live that can translate everything on-screen in real-time, but that’s the only negative point to what is otherwise an incredible translation experience.
The result is an ability to understand and immerse yourself in the local culture. Buying gadgets in Huaqiangbei, China’s largest tech market? It’s quick and easy to ask questions, understand responses, and negotiate a price. Want to translate a food menu where the pictures or pre-written English translations don’t make sense? Just capture a photo and let the translation app do the work.
By far, its biggest benefit is in conversations, especially when there’s a back-and-forth.
Built for conversations
One of the biggest surprises during my visit was the prevalence of people using AI translation apps. Whether ordering drinks in a bar, food in a restaurant, or haggling with a market stall owner, everyone has a translation app on their phone, so it feels natural to use one as well.
This makes it easy to have conversations with someone solely through an app on a phone. However, none of the apps I saw others use were as good as Oppo’s new translation app. Powered by DeepSeek, it’s incredibly fast and extremely powerful; crucially, after checking with friends and people I met, it’s also very accurate.
The app is one of the key reasons I’ll always carry a Find X8 Ultra with me when I travel. It’s only available on phones running a Chinese ROM, but as I also discovered, it’s not too different from the global ROM. You can uninstall virtually every preloaded app, can install the Google Play Store with just a tap, and it otherwise seems to work just like a phone available elsewhere.
In addition to translating screenshots or photos, the app also enables you to translate text you write or a voice recording. There’s also a conversation mode, where you can either choose to have a live conversation that alternates back-and-forth between two people in real-time or a more passive conversation where you manually start and stop recording in different languages.
The latter also comes with one crucial advantage: conversation history. This one feature is the key reason this translation app is the best I’ve ever used.
Is this the future of learning languages?
Have you ever tried to learn a new language? It’s one of the hardest things to do, because most translation apps force you down a path of learning a lot of things you don’t need to know before teaching you the things you do need to know.
I learn far more by doing and immersing myself in that language than I do by learning the theory, and the conversation history feature is my secret weapon to quickly learning key phrases that I find myself asking frequently. I don’t necessarily need to know the four tones in Mandarin – each of which can change the meaning of the word it is attached to – but I do need to know what to say and how to pronounce that phrase properly.
This is particularly necessary when you have food allergies and need to ask the same question repeatedly: as someone with a life-threatening allergy, it’s incredibly useful to be able to revisit the same translation as many times as you want, instead of needing to ask for it repeatedly.
This led me to another discovery: this is ideal for learning a new language. I don’t need to know everything to have a functional understanding of a language for my needs, and I quickly learned key phrases just by listening to them repeatedly. I then flipped the language pair in reverse and recited them until I was able to trigger the correct English translation of the phrase.
As they say, practice makes perfect, and repeating these phrases means they’re also ingrained in my head. In just four days, this app helped me learn more than 30 new phrases in Mandarin, including how to pronounce them and recognize when someone is saying them. As a result, I feel far more confident about trying to learn Mandarin. It’s only been a day since I returned from China, but I’ve already picked up three additional phrases that I can’t wait to try.
I’m not sure about you, but I’ve always struggled with learning a new language. Now, for the first time, I feel confident about my chances. In addition to being accurate and user-friendly, it’s also incredibly convenient, allowing me to continue learning everywhere I go, and it turns learning a language into a game you play with yourself. I look forward to learning even more and using it on my next visit to China.