Hans Christian Andersen once said, “To travel is to live,” and while that’s a romantic notion, he probably wasn’t careening through Gyeongju, South Korea, at midnight in the back of a taxi with a driver who didn’t speak a lick of English.

A lot has changed since the 1800s, to be fair. Today’s world traveler has it awfully easy when it comes to understanding the local lingo, as even a basic modern cell phone app can offer a pretty good translation of common phrases delivered in everything from Abkhaz to Zulu. Type or speak a sentence or two into the app, tap a button, and out it returns in the language of your choice. Tap another button, and your phone can even speak those sentences aloud. It takes a little doing to turn this into a credible two-way conversation—especially if the cab driver isn’t slowing down—but with some patience and good humor, two strangers can engage in a reasonable discussion this way.

Casual travelers merely in need of directions to the farmacia or who want to know exactly what they’re getting into with a plate of kycklingtallrik can get by with a phone and a translation app, and if you’re going to a place with a fairly common tongue, you may not even need an active internet connection if you download the relevant language file for offline use. Google Translate, Apple Translate, or DeepL Translate will all do the job for free, though Google’s product is widely considered the gold standard for cross-language chitchat.

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