Get smart translations at your wrist with iTranslate's support for Time Travel

It’s a Time Travellin’ kind of day today. Not only have we recommended CARROT for Apple Watch based on its support for the Crown-spinning feature, but iTranslate is also a Watch app we love because of its clever, novel Time Travel integration.

In iTranslate you can get translations on the fly from the Apple Watch, and this is great. There’s a Glance and complication, too, offering shortcuts to the Watch app. And of course, thanks to watchOS 2, iTranslate can access the smart watch’s built-in microphone for translations, making real-life feel more closer to “Star Trek” than ever before.

As well as all this, though, iTranslate’s big complication lets users Time Travel in order to check on the correct time-appropriate greeting (because, in Europe, “hey” just doesn’t cut it for morning, afternoon, and evening). Once enabled, this complication will show the correct greeting for the current time. I’ve had it configured for English to Spanish, and at 6:14 p.m. it’s currently reading “Buenas tardes.” That sounds about right to me.

However, a spin on the Digital Crown soon sees the text in this complication shift. At 10 p.m. it switches to “Buenas noches” (“Good night”) and then to “Buenos días” for “Good morning” and, later, “Good day.” More useful, I think, is checking on the correct greeting for the current time, and for this of course you won’t need to Time Travel. But it’s nevertheless a super-useful feature that folks in foreign lands will undoubtedly appreciate.

Plus, who doesn’t want a language translator on their wrist? Just make sure you’ve got international data coverage first before relying on iTranslate abroad.