Photo Mode: Translate Images, Signs and Screenshots
Fink can now translate the text in an image. You upload a photo or screenshot, or take a picture with your phone, and Fink reads the text, translates it and pa…
How Polite Should Your Japanese Be? A Guide to Politeness Levels
English lets you write a sentence without deciding how you stand with the reader. You pick words, you pick a tone, and the grammar stays out of the way. Japane…
Back Translation: How to Check a Translation You Can't Read
You need to send a message in a language you can't read: a thank-you to a Japanese colleague, a question to a landlord in Osaka. The translator gives you a sen…
How to Tell if an AI Translation Is Correct?
Someone types a message to a landlord, hits translate, and the sentence comes back smooth, confident, natural. It sounds right, and that is exactly the problem…
Translating Japanese: 10 Pitfalls That Quietly Change the Meaning
A bad translation from French or Spanish usually looks bad: a clumsy phrase, a wrong word, something a reader trips over. A bad translation from Japanese often…
Translating a Cover Letter: What Google Translate Gets Wrong
You wrote your cover letter in German, the job ad is in English, and you paste the text into Google Translate. The English that comes back is understandable, a…
Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet
If you start learning Japanese, you will see 東京 on a sign and have no idea how to say it. Kanji and kana carry sound, but only for readers who already know the…
Mistral vs GLM: a French model and a Chinese model, split by writing system
Across 375 translation pairs in 25 target languages, neither model came out ahead overall. Sorted by writing system, the two separate: Mistral Medium 3.5 won m…
Understanding IPA: The Pronunciation System That Works for Every Language
At some point in learning a language you can recognize a word on the page, know what it means, and still have no idea how it sounds. Spelling is a set of local…
How to Use a Translator to Learn a Language (Without It Doing the Learning for You)
Language teachers often tell students not to use a translator, and plenty of students use one anyway. The two sides tend to picture different activities. In on…
Why are LLMs so good at translation?
If you used machine translation fifteen years ago, you remember the output: readable in places, funny in others, and full of words that had no business sitting…
The effect of LLMs for Translation: What are people using for translation in 2026?
Google says more than a billion people a month now ask it for translations. Over the same period, third-party traffic estimates show the standalone translation…