Yandex Translate Review
The website translator
Pick it for the website translation — it's the only app here that can read a whole foreign page to you in place. For everyday phrases, the big names are usually sharper.
Where Yandex Translate shines
- Translates entire websites in place — unique in this ranking
- Offline packs, photo translation, and a two-person dialog mode
- Genuinely cross-platform: Android, iPhone, and a full web version
- Excellent for Russian and other Slavic languages
- Hindi showed a garbled pronunciation guide and no voice output in our test
- Translation quality trails Google and DeepL outside its home languages
- Runs on the servers of Yandex, a Russian company — worth knowing for sensitive content
Yandex Translate is Russia's answer to Google Translate, and on its home turf — Russian, Ukrainian, and neighboring languages — it is arguably the sharper tool. It covers around 100 languages, offers downloadable offline packs, photo translation, and a two-person dialog mode, and it is free on Android, iPhone, and the web.
The feature that earns it a place in this ranking is website translation. Paste a link and the app opens the page with the text translated in place, layout intact, with a toggle to flip between original and translation. Nobody else here does that inside a phone app. In our hands-on test it translated a full Wikipedia article to Spanish in seconds — imperfectly (the article's own title was mistranslated), but readably.
Our Hindi test showed the app's edges: the translation itself was correct, but the Latin pronunciation guide under it was garbled nonsense, and there is no Hindi voice output. That pattern — solid core translation, unpolished extras — sums up Yandex outside its strongest languages. One more consideration: translations run on Yandex's servers, and it is a Russian company; for confidential material that may matter to you.
Version reviewed: 113.2 · July 30, 2026
Screenshots below were captured by our automated test rig on a real Android phone (Moto G Power 2021, Android 11) running the current Play Store build.
A clean translator with five modes
The home screen is refreshingly simple: pick two languages, start typing, and the answer appears. Along the bottom are five modes — favorites, photo, text, sites and dialog. That 'sites' tab is the one nobody else in this ranking has, and we'll get to it below. About 100 languages are on the list, and you can download offline packs so it keeps working without internet.
Hindi: good translation, garbled pronunciation guide
We asked it to translate 'Where can I find the fish market?' into Hindi. The Hindi answer (मुझे मछली बाजार कहां मिल सकता है?) is correct — a Hindi speaker would understand it instantly. But look at the gray line under it, which is supposed to tell you how to pronounce it: 'mujhe fishli mar kahan mil cata ha?' is half-invented gibberish. And the speaker icon on the Hindi side is crossed out — the app can't say the sentence out loud in Hindi. Fine if you'll show your phone to someone; useless if you wanted to say it yourself.
Dialog mode for two speakers
Dialog mode gives each person their own microphone button and language. You take turns tapping your mic and speaking, and the app translates each turn. It's the same idea as Google's and Apple's conversation modes — nothing fancier, but it's here and it works.
Its party trick: translating whole websites
Paste any web address into the sites tab and Yandex opens the page with every sentence translated, keeping the layout intact. Here it translated Wikipedia's article about machine translation into Spanish. Fittingly, you can also see the limits: the article's own title came out as 'Máquina de traducción' ('translation machine') — wrong — while the first sentence of the article gets the same term right. Rough edges aside, no other app in this ranking can do this at all.
Is Yandex Translate free?
Yes — the mobile apps and the web version are free.
What is Yandex Translate best at?
Russian and nearby languages, and translating entire websites in place — a feature no other app in this ranking has.
vs Google Translate
vs DeepL
vs Naver Papago