Apple Translate Review

Private, on-device, effortless

The translator you already own

It's on every iPhone, free, with no ads, no account, and nothing to set up — two boxes, three tabs, done. And it has a superpower the big apps don't: translation happens on the phone itself, not on a company's servers. What you type never leaves your pocket. For a doctor's visit, a legal question, or anything else private, that's the best reason in this whole ranking to pick an app.

Conversation mode feels like texting

The Conversation tab lays a spoken exchange out like a chat: each turn is a bubble showing both languages together — here 'Where can I find the fish market?' with '¿Dónde puedo encontrar el mercado de pescado?' right beneath it, and a play button to say it out loud. One microphone serves both people: it listens and works out which language was spoken. The View button switches to a face-to-face layout for sitting across a table.

Lay the phone flat between you

Tap View and pick Face to Face, and the screen splits in two: the top half flips completely upside down — look at the microphone button up there — so the person across the table reads their side right-side up while you read yours. Each half gets its own mic, turning the phone into a small interpreter's desk between two people. One possible bug in the version we tested: we asked 'Where can I find the fish market?' with the other side set to Japanese, and while the chat view translated it perfectly (魚市場はどこで見つけられますか？), the flipped top half stayed empty — the other person never sees the sentence, as you can see in this screenshot.

Big, readable results you can scroll back through

Typed translations stack up as large-print cards — easy to hand across a counter — each with play buttons for both languages, a star to save it, and copy. The quality holds up where it counts: our polite English request came out as 'Könnten Sie', the respectful German form, matching what DeepL produces. Everything stays on this scrollable feed, so the phrase you needed this morning is still there tonight.

The trade-off: it keeps things small

One screen of caveats. The language list is this little dropdown — about 20 languages, so check yours is on it before you rely on the app (Icelandic, for example, isn't; Google covers 249). And results are minimal: one answer, with no pronunciation guide for scripts like Hindi's and no alternative phrasings to pick from. That small scope explains its surprisingly low 2.3-star App Store rating — but if your language is covered and privacy matters to you, what it does, it does correctly.