Practical on vacation: How to translate every restaurant menu with your cell phone
On vacation or in authentic restaurants, the menu is sometimes simply not available in German or English. If you want to decode the dishes quickly, you can do it easily with your cell phone.
Whether on holiday or at the authentic restaurant around the corner: some menus are only written in the original language and do not offer a translation into German. If you don’t understand what the names of the dishes mean, you have to ask the staff for advice.
But there is also a trick with your smartphone, thanks to which you can easily help yourself. In this way, you can translate the entire menu without googling each dish individually and can unerringly select the right food.
Translation with Android
With Android devices, you can automatically translate images. You need the free one for this
Google Translator
which is already pre-installed on many devices.
In the app, simply tap the camera icon at the bottom right and hold your smartphone over the menu. The language shown is recognized automatically, alternatively you can set it manually.
The Google translator will then show you the German meaning of the dishes in real time – this is particularly useful if a small description of the ingredients has been given under the name of the dish.
Tip:
If you don’t want to use up any data volume on vacation, you can also download the desired languages beforehand and have them translated offline later. So it works even without reception in remote places.
This is how it works with the iPhone
With the iPhone, you don’t need a separate app to translate the menu. Just open the preinstalled camera and hold it over the menu – bottom right should then
a text icon
appear.
If you tap on it, the “Translate” button will appear next to it. Most of the time you don’t even have to select the language as it is automatically detected. You may have to agree at this point that the text will be sent to Apple servers for translation.
After a short wait, the German version will be displayed above the actual image. This also works surprisingly well with different fonts on the menu.
The original of this post “How to translate any menu in the restaurant with your mobile phone” comes from chip.de.
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