Listening in yTranslate has always meant 130+ languages. Now the speaker's voice has 30+.

Imagine a church where a visiting pastor from Romania has been invited to preach on Sunday, and the congregation speaks English.

Until now, yTranslate would only have worked in one direction in that church. English at the front could reach every language in the seats. Romanian at the front could not be heard at all, because it was not a language you could speak in. Korean and Russian depended on whether the phone at the front happened to recognise them.

Now he can preach in Romanian. One phone at the front listens, and everyone reads along in English, or in whatever language they choose.

What's new

13 languages are now on our main speech engine: Afrikaans, Cantonese, Catalan, Estonian, Galician, Korean, Marathi, Persian, Romanian, Russian, Urdu, Xhosa and Zulu.

Because they run on the engine and not on the phone, they work the same way on every phone, iPhone or Android. That makes 30+ languages you can speak in. Listeners still choose from over 130.

Speaking in any of them costs the same as speaking in English. Credits depend on how long you speak and how many listener languages are active, never on the language you speak.

Conversations too

Conversational Mode works in all of them. Two people share one phone and take turns, each in their own language. yTranslate works out who is speaking and translates both ways, while everyone else in the room keeps reading in theirs.

That covers moments like a Romanian grandmother and her English-speaking grandson, or a Persian-speaking parent at parents' evening.

Who it helps

  • South African congregations and schools. A service or an assembly can be led in Afrikaans, Xhosa or Zulu, while everyone reads along in their own language.
  • Korean and Romanian churches abroad. The preaching can stay in the mother tongue, while a younger generation that reads English more easily follows every word.
  • Persian and Urdu-speaking communities. Whoever is speaking at a gathering can use their own language, and everyone else follows in theirs.
  • Hong Kong families. Cantonese at the table, and relatives abroad reading along in English.

How to start

  1. Update to the latest version.

    Get it from the App Store or Google Play.

  2. Pick your speaking language.

    You'll find it on the Speaker tab.

  3. Create a room.

    Start speaking and share the code. Listeners join for free, with no account.

What we won't claim

Accuracy varies with accent, how clearly someone speaks, background noise and the microphone. Try it in your own room before you rely on it.

Polish, Ukrainian, Thai and Traditional Chinese still depend on your phone's own speech recognizer, so whether you can speak them depends on your device. Listening in them works on every phone.

And it is not a human interpreter. If you have a skilled interpreter for the one language you need, keep them. yTranslate is for everyone else.

Looking for more on how yTranslate works? Visit the yTranslate blog.