Disclosure up front: I've been building a tool in this space myself, which is why I've thought about this so much. Not promoting it here — just sharing what I've actually learned. Mods, happy to remove if this crosses any line. I work remotely and my main work language is German, occasionally English. But I suck at German — I can read it pretty well, but listening and speaking have always been my weakness. I've had way too many awkward moments from not being able to follow a conversation. So I've stress-tested basically every translation tool out there. Some honest observations: The tools, ranked by what I actually use them for:
- DeepL — still the gold standard for written text. Pasting an email or a contract from your landlord? Nothing beats it. But it's not real-time, it's not for speech, and it doesn't help in meetings.
- Google Translate (conversation mode) — works for short, slow, in-person exchanges. Falls apart the moment the conversation moves at native speed or people interrupt each other. The UX (passing the phone back and forth) is also socially awkward in real life.
- Otter / Fireflies — great for English meeting transcripts. Translation is an afterthought and accuracy drops hard for non-English audio.
- Built-in Zoom / Teams / Meet captions — improving fast, but accuracy varies wildly by language, speed isn't great, and you can't display both languages side by side.
Where every tool I've tried still falls short:
- Latency vs. accuracy tradeoff. A 4-second-delayed translation is unusable for live conversation, no matter how accurate. Most tools optimize for the wrong axis.
- Asian↔European pairs. EN↔ES or EN↔FR works pretty well. EN↔ZH or EN↔JA is still rough on most platforms.
- Real-time vocabulary lookup. When I hear a German word I don't know mid-meeting, I want to tap it and see the meaning instantly without breaking the flow. No live translation tool I've tried makes this seamless. Feels like a missed opportunity, because real conversations are the best language-learning material.
Question for the sub: What's your actual stack? Especially curious about people in non-English-dominant countries (Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil, Turkey…) — what are you using day-to-day? And has anyone found something that genuinely solves the fast multi-speaker conversation problem? That's still my biggest unsolved one.