Then I ask them via the app about the cost of a taxi to the airport since we’re worried we’ll get lost taking the subway and miss our flight.

The receptionists nod that they indeed have a room at a reasonable price. The hotel receptionists look at me oddly.įinally, I get the right words into the app, and Jibbigo translates to perfection. Before the translation enters the final phase into a voice speaking Japanese, I quickly shake the iPhone to delete the translation. Apparently, my English isn’t very good, because the app translates my words into gobbledygook. The app takes some 10 seconds to translate, leaving all of us uncomfortably staring at each other. Still at the reception desk, I speak into the iPhone, asking if there are rooms available tonight and at what rate. That’s when I decide to test the voice-to-voice translation app for the iPhone, Jibbigo, which doesn’t require an Internet connection. The three receptionists struggle to communicate with us in English. Both Droid apps require a data connection, which we were too cheap to buy. He launches iTranslator for Android without success. We find a nearby hotel, walk up to the reception desk, and my friend whips out his Droid and fires up Google Translate, which doesn’t work. So we work out a plan: First, lock down a cheap room at a business hotel near the train station, find someone to walk us through the particulars of getting on the right bus and then grab a bowl of delicious ramen noodles. We also have to navigate a complex subway system to get to the airport the next morning. Neither of us can speak a lick of Japanese.įinding a hotel is the least of our worries. And so my friend and I found ourselves stranded in Nagoya, a city in the center of Japan, without a hotel or our Japanese-speaking travel companions. Thanks to some severely poor planning, my trip to Japan last week ended up being one more day than I had expected.

Apple translator online