WilliamSmith wrote: ↑February 24th, 2022, 3:03 am
I just sprang for this $74 translator, for better or worse:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0868HXNCJ/
It says it can do 138 languages online, but 14 languages offline, including Japanese and Cantonese, among others.
Anyone have any updated opinions on these devices?
I've found some ranging from $75ish to $130 that seem to say you can use them offline without needing wifi on. User reviews vary.
Wow, this little thing is neat!

It arrived today, and it had Japanese and Chinese with simplified characters as two of the preloaded languages. (I forget the other ones, but Russian was also one of the 14 preloaded languages.)
I could speak English into it right away (all offline) and have it translate accurately to Japanese and print written Japanese (Kanji and kana) on the screen, but there was no voice playback at first.
However, after I connected it to wifi once in order to experiment, then it did start having text-to-speech voices play back the translated Japanese, and it works offline with the voice playback now too.
So now it does translate what I say into it, print out the text in both languages, and play back the translation with a text-to-speech synth voice similar to the ones on Google, Yandex, etc.
I don't like frying my brain on wifi any more than necessary, so this was an awesome buy for me, since I can use this offline to speak into it in English and have it translate it into Japanese and spoken back to me by the text-to-speech robot.
(It also works the other way, you can just click a button to reverse languages, and speak Japanese into it and see it convert what you said into written Japanese, and have it translate to English. So this thing is going to probably be really useful for me to practice offline.)
It also has a decent built-in camera to capture printed text and translate it, but that requires wifi to work, as far as I can tell.
Also, it's not a big deal, but it doesn't exactly do Cantonese like the sale page says, as far as I can tell, since the "Traditional Chinese" characters that are used in Taiwan and Hong Kong and so on are there, but the TTS voice speaks in Mandarin and it translates into Mandarin grammar structures (not Cantonese, which shares lots of things but has quite a few of its own particle words and grammar structures and so on). But at least you can get the manly traditional Chinese characters instead of the wussy simplified characters, LOL.
