By Michael Cristiano Last updated: April 10, 2023

3 Great Italian Translator Apps for Understanding and Learning Italian

You never know when you’ll need a translator app.

Maybe you’re finally on that dream trip to Italy and discover you don’t speak as much Italian as you thought.

Or you’re learning online and just want to check how to say words and phrases as they pop into your head.

Either way, an Italian translator app can really come in handy.

Let’s check out three recommendations to get you started.

The Italian Translator App: A Language Learner’s Savior
The 3 Best Italian Translator Apps for Your Smartphone

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The Italian Translator App: A Language Learner’s Savior

While there’s no replacement for actually learning the Italian language, whether in a course or in a self-study program, translator apps can be an indispensable tool throughout your learning.

Translator apps can be used in a travel situation or alongside you as you study. They can be very useful as you trudge through Italian course materials and as you tune into Italian media. It’s a fast-paced Italian world, and sometimes all you need is a quick English translation to get you up to speed.

If you’d also like to find an app that will (hopefully) reduce the need for having to use a translator, one option is FluentU. Its Italian lessons are based off of native-level videos with captions in Italian and English displaying as you watch them, thus enabling you to cross-check the translations as you go. It has other features (like adaptive flashcards) to help you retain your new vocabulary as well.

Now let’s check out the top three Italian apps for translating to get the conversation flowing—and fast!

The 3 Best Italian Translator Apps for Your Smartphone

Italian English Dictionary

The Italian English Dictionary app is available for Apple products, and it’s about as extensive as language translation apps get.

This Ascendo app has a dictionary with over 278,000 entries—a pretty high number, even compared to the competition. This means that, if there’s ever a situation where you need to translate something into either language, this app will definitely be able to help you out.

In addition to translations, the Italian English Dictionary app offers audio files. After looking up a word in the app, learners can hear how the Italian word is supposed to be pronounced. This is an invaluable tool not only during spontaneous conversation but also while studying the Italian language.

Furthermore, this app offers essential Italian phrases sorted into 18 categories. This is a great companion while studying and practicing Italian because it offers you revisions on the go and gives you plenty of Italian phrases organized in such a way that they’re easily accessible.

Even better, the Italian English Dictionary has a verb conjugator to help you use Italian verbs in any tense!

iTranslate

If you didn’t already guess, iTranslate is available for Apple products (so you can get it on your iPod or iPad—or anything else that starts with an “i”).

While it’s particularly great for Italian learners, this app also offers in-depth translations for 90 other languages. While this might seem like a lot, this is great for any learners who don’t speak English as their native language, as you can translate between Italian and a language you feel more comfortable with. And if you’re studying Italian plus another language, you can now work on both at the same time.

Translations can be done on the app by typing or speaking, thanks to the voice recognition feature. Like a few others, this app is available offline for when learners don’t have Internet access and need a translation in a pinch.

Furthermore, in addition to straightforward translations, this app offers synonyms for when learners are looking to be extra precise and it offers Italian verb conjugations to help learners use verbs in the correct tense.

WordReference

Available in the Google Play Store and for Apple products, WordReference is an online dictionary turned app that’s the number one stop for language learners.

WordReference is available in quite a few languages, but that doesn’t mean its Italian translation abilities are lacking. This app offers a written pronunciation guide for saying the Italian translation itself. It more than makes up for its lack of audio in its extensive dictionary capabilities.

WordReference’s dictionary is so in-depth that it gives multiples definitions as well as idiomatic and phrasal meanings to each translated Italian and English word. This means that learners not only get literal translations for Italian words but figurative meanings as well.

This app also has a very in-depth verb conjugation component, and it virtually conjugates every single Italian verb into every single verb tense in Italian. In short, verb conjugation capabilities don’t get much more intricate than WordReference.

As if the dictionary and verb conjugator weren’t enough, each dictionary entry on WordReference links to various threads on the WordReference forums to help learners when they need more information than the app provides.

So, there you have it! Get back into that shop, Italian learner.

You’ve got some biscotti to buy!