This is how you know all reviews are bought and paid for on the Apple Store: here’s an actual decent app and it’s reviewed at 4.3. Then there’s Uber eats, which we all know is utter garbage and hyper unreliable, and that has nearly 5 stars. I wish we didn’t live in an age where reviews are bought and paid for. But that’s just how it is. Anyways. I don’t know who is paying reviewers to rate this app badly - I’m guessing translation companies who charge for service unlike google translate, but it actually functions as it should. With trillions of possible combinations of word choices that go into any given sentence, it does an impressive job of translating pretty well. If you need to translate something, this Apple do it every time. Five stars. Whereas if you need food from Uber eats, it’s not going to arrive 25% of the time or it’s going to arrive super late. That actually merits three stars. Here I am, trying to socially engineer the world into being less idiotic in an app review. Joke is on me.

The Google translate app is a joke. There are very few apps that can lead someone to yell expletives while sitting in their kitchen trying to enjoy a cup of tea. Editing something you’ve written on the Google Translate App is a pitiful process filled with tapping the screen of your phone over and over attempting to unselect individual words or sentences. Sometimes it selects the entirety of what you’ve written and won’t allow you to unselect it without a fight. It’s unconscionable that the process for editing what you’ve written doesn’t follow every other smart phone format. Not only that, when you’ve finished writing of considerable length, in my case an email, and would like to highlight, copy and paste it, you will quickly realize you cannot highlight and scroll at the same time like you can on any other apple app that includes type. Instead, you’re forced to go through a ridiculous process of highlighting as much as you can see, pasting it, returning to the app, copying more and then pasting that. I repeated that process six time before I had copied my email over to gmail. If I had more time I would go into detail about the “define” tool that pops up unprovoked and further adds to the absolute farce that is the UX of this application. For a company like Google to have produced such a dysfunctional infuriating UI is truly shameful.

As usual an update makes the produce worse instead of better. I live in a foreign country because of my husbands job. I use this app everyday. ALL THE TIME! Before, I could use the camera option to translate in real time or take a picture and let it scan for text. Then I could choose which text to translate, it could be 1 word or 1 sentence or 1 paragraph or the whole thing. The lastest update removed this option. Now when I click on the camera option it says “Google lens” it automatically blocks out the original texts and puts the translation over it, like it did previously but now when I take the picture I can not scan the text and choose what part to translate. It simply takes a screen shot of the translation already made on the first screen. If I try to select a specific word, it selects the translation and then translates it back into the original language. This does work well! The meaning gets more and more mixed up until it just makes no sense at all. Translating a translation instead of just scanning the original text is a huge downgrade. I am so frustrated! I am going to start looking for other translators because this has caused a lot of issues for me, on a daily basis. I’ll keep checking back to see if they ever fix this issue or not.

This was an incredibly useful app that I used for reading Japanese characters that I was not familiar with. It would provide the reading in Japanese along with the translation into English or another language. The update changed the ocr function and now it uses google lens which is terrible in this case. The text is automatically translated into English and I have to change the setting every time I use it to “show original language” just to be able to find the character I am trying to read. Please add the option to disable the automatic translation function for the camera. Also the word selection is buggy. I used to be able to highlight exactly what I wanted to translate. Now it tries to auto-select words and frequently selects parts of text I don’t need or won’t select the text I want. Please switch back to manually highlight method or make it an option. Finally, please bring back the reading/pronunciation of the original word (the reading of the Japanese character in this case). This app was a 6 stars out of 5 before. After this update to google lens it’s just 2 since the functionality I relied on is gone now. I give it 2 stars because it is still useful for translating European languages.