Tip: NEVER use google translate for Japanese! (Even for travel) It's so bad!
this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2026
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What would you recommend instead of Google lens/translate?
If you're interested in learning the language, but don't have 3 years to prepare:
Jisho.org is an online English-Japanese dictionary that helps you find words by selecting radicals from a chart. You can learn to break down 99% of common kanji into their radicals within a week and then it's a matter of selecting 2 or 3 radicals in the chart and matching the picture. Finding all the kanji in a sentence (or more likely, the three kanji on a menu item) should give you a decent idea of the full meaning. Now you point at the menu, say the standard question from your phrase book, give a polite nod, hold out your money at the appropriate time, and you're nihongo jouzu.
Edit: I would only recommend this method if we're not using Google Lens. Lens is way faster and you can still decipher the menu with your dictionary after your food arrived.
DeepL
Not the most ethical answer but a paid chatgpt subscription.
Even a medium sized local model can do 90% of the job now.
Just gotta set it up ahead of time so you can use it outside the house.
I was pretty pleased to discover that I could OCR and translate Japanese ROMs to English using local models that fit within my 6GB of VRAM on my laptop. I wouldn't want to play a narrative heavy game that way, but it was sufficient to read menus and make choices in more action oriented games.
I travel a lot so I'm not sure I'd want to have a server running at home. Or do you mean I set it up in my hotel?
While i ment at home. Im going to be honest giving it a few moments thought. Since your already traveling you likely have a laptop. A ryzen laptop while expensive. Arn't really that much more then a good work station/gaming laptop both are fucking over priced as fucking hell right now to be fair. But your paying 3.5-4k either way. A ryzen laptop with lpddr is like 3800-4000 dollars for 128 gigs of ram. You could totally do a local model right from your hotel room.
Frankly i would say this is a more realistic option after the bubble goes pop and you can pick up something like this for like 2000 bucks. Since the laptops tend to be really nice reguardless and at least justifiable around that price point.
I didn't mention this so there's no way you could've known but this is not realistic for my situation. I travel a lot for my job, most of the translations I need are during negotiations or when navigating a new country. During these situations I quickly look up things on my phone. Carrying around a gaming laptop for these purposes would be highly impractical. Plus I'm in East Asia so most of my meetings are in restaurants or bars.