What happened
Which?, the UK consumer organization, published a test of four free translation apps on 17 July 2025. The article first appeared in the January edition of its Which? Travel magazine. Fluent speakers of Hindi, Italian and Polish tried Google Translate, Apple Translate, Microsoft Translator and DeepL. They held a spoken conversation about finding a bus stop and buying a ticket. They also checked the apps' English translations of restaurant menus in their languages. Which? reports that its Polish and Italian speakers both said that Google Translate translated their menus most accurately. It was the only one of the four apps that offered Devanagari, the script used for Hindi, and it did a broadly good job on a Delhi menu. The app still made errors, such as "blurred boomers" for fried beetroot on the Polish menu. Its automatic language detection in conversation mode was unreliable. The article does not say how many people took part or count the errors. It does not describe the models behind the apps.
Sources
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Assessment report, by authors with no tie to the system.
Which? Travel (Rory Boland). The best translation apps in 2025 that'll cost you nothing. 17 July 2025, first published in the January edition of Which? Travel magazine. Which? recruited fluent speakers to test four free apps. Section 'Google Translate review'.
Our Polish and Italian speakers both said the app translated their menus most accurately (and it was the only app that could translate Devanagari script).
Of the four apps we tried out, only Google Translate currently offers Devanagari (the written script used by speakers of Hindi), but did a broadly good job on the menu from a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Delhi.
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Press release, by the makers. Context or contrary evidence.
Google, The Keyword blog. Google Translate's instant camera translation gets an upgrade. 10 July 2019. It states the technology behind the app's camera translation.
For the first time, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology is built into instant camera translations. This produces more accurate and natural translations, reducing errors by 55-85 percent in certain language pairs.
Details
AI system
- Workflow
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Fluent speakers of Hindi, Italian and Polish tested four free apps. The speakers photographed restaurant menus with each app and checked the English translations. They also held a spoken conversation about a bus stop and tickets through each app.
- Relation to AI
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Which? Tested the app itself, so the results describe Google Translate's own output. It compared four apps and did not compare them with a human translator. The article does not call the apps AI or describe their models. Google wrote in 2019 that neural machine translation was built into the app's instant camera translation.
Follow-up
- Conditions for replication
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The app must support the language, and Which? Counts 243 languages in Google Translate. The user must focus the camera so that the translation appears, a step that Which? Found fiddly at times.
Entry details
- Sector
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Consumer technology.
- Purpose
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Google built Google Translate to translate text, speech and images between languages, including text seen through a phone's camera.
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model, release, provider, role, configuration, inputs and outputs, autonomy, human oversight, AI contribution, beneficiaries, reach, distribution and access, duration, every measurement question, every money question, ownership and control, dependencies, cross-border connections, geopolitical implications, replication attempts, availability, institutional decision, grounds, action and result, success criterion, every evidence question, observed or intended, alternative assessments, related entries, other identifiers, category mappings.
Cite this record
Peter H. Vartanian. (2026). Google Translate translates menus best in Which?'s fluent-speaker test (AIBD-1057). Artificial Intelligence Benefits Database, edition of 1 November 2026. https://petervartanian.xyz/aibd/records/AIBD-1057.html (archived at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AADSII, version 7.0)