Hello: I’ve secured two sits from pet owners who are looking forward to letting me stay at their home the day before of their leaving; however, they don’t speak English very well, and in one case, not at all. Google Translate can help in a pinch but it will get tiresome quickly. Is there a device that will allow us to have a conversation with it on? I plan to take one of the pet owners out for dinner and would love to have the conversation go well. For the record, I’m taking French lessons daily.
On a different note, I know with chatgpt you can ask it to have a conversation back to you in a foreign language in a conversational way so that you can learn the language, ie you use it as though it’s a real life conversation between you and it. So I don’t know, but I would have naturally presumed you could also instruct it to simply translate everything that is said into whichever language too.
Ooo, that would be difficult. We always make sure we have a little of the language of our hosts and they all have a little English but never in the situation you are facing. Let us know how you get on. Bonne Chance
Or maybe invite someone else to dinner who knows both languages (or even pay a translator). Personally, I do two-way translation for friends and family and it basically means you can’t eat much during a shared meal.
I tried it out a bit now - I managed well using google and the microphone feature for translation. It seems though that it is quite formal and not how people would speak in everyday situations for my chosen language (Japanese).
I’d think that typically the case, because they train LLMs and such off what’s readily available in language lessons. With colloquial speech, they’d probably need more expensive human inputs. And with colloquial speech evolving much more quickly, that’s expensive to keep updating.
My husband has tried to learn languages for many years and is always complaining about that. I told him to watch current entertainment — likes movies and TV series set in modern day — if he wants to learn colloquial conversation.
As a kid, English was my third language and I learned from stuff like “Sesame Street.”
I am also reading the French house sitters ads in French - and switch back to Google translate to l arm more French. As a Canadian, we have French language on all our consumer products and I took 5 years in school so at least have a grounding. But watching French TV is a good tip.. and listening to the radio.
Suggest checkout DeepL iOS app. We used it extensively when housesitting & travelling in Portugal. We were advised by locals that it provided better translation than other apps.
I will try it out with a French friend before my trip to become familiar with how it works then report back to you all. I have 3 sits with pet owners this summer (I’m travelling to France) who either don’t speak English at all or have limited French. (A good friend translated for us during our video call for two of the sits). I now look at the pet owner’s profile to see if they have English language. Still - while I’m strengthening my French understanding - I will now need to leap into conversational French.
I may have shared that a delightful couple in France chose me to sit for their Bichon and two cats. But my French is poor and they don’t speak English. The only way we could communicate was help from a French friend who translated for us during a video call. My concern now is arriving at their doorstep in person in June and not being able to hold a good French conversation beyond Bonjour. I’m looking for some device that will allow us to at least have a conversation.
Does anyone know of a good language app that will translate two languages in conversation - French-English in my case. Love to hear your suggestions.
@GotYourBack I’ve tried out the DeepL website and can confirm that I found it much better at translating written English - French than Google. I’ll have to check if they have an Android app. Happily my spoken French is good enough to not need it in a “live” conversation, but it saves a lot of time when I need to write in French.
@Debbie, that’s great to hear.
I’m not very good at languages - heck English is a struggle some days
But happy to steal good ideas and to experiment. DeepL has fewer languages than Google. But seems to work. A European lawyer mentioned to us that their firm used DeepL to translate documents - comment caught my attention as tool surely had to be pretty good for that purpose.
Irrespective of language tools, hope that you enjoy international travel. Meeting lovely people in unfamiliar cultures sure is a treat
