Surtitle: Live Translator

Surtitle listens to the person speaking, like a tour guide, a priest or a lecturer, and keeps a running caption in your language on your iPhone or iPad for as long as they talk. Afterwards you have the whole talk as a transcript to search and share. LIVE CAPTIONS • Tap Start listening once. Each sentence shows up in your language a second or two after it's said, with the original underneath. • The sentence still being spoken appears as it's heard, in lighter type, with a rough translation that settles when the sentence ends. • It doesn't wait for the speaker to pause, and it doesn't turn the microphone off when they do. After 30 minutes with nothing heard, it ends and saves the talk. • It picks up a speaker from across a room, so the phone can sit on the table in front of you. • Scroll back to read something again, and Back to live takes you to the newest line. • Tap a line to mark it, like the time and place to meet the group. • Make the text bigger, hide the original, or turn on Dim, which takes the screen as dark as it goes with amber text, for a church or a dark hall. • It keeps listening with the screen locked. If another app takes the microphone, Surtitle pauses and carries on when you come back. NO MINUTES AND NO SIGNAL Apple's speech recognition and translation run on your iPhone or iPad. Download the two languages once, and Surtitle works with no signal and no data. Nothing counts minutes, so a three-hour tour is one talk. TRANSCRIPTS • Each line is saved as soon as it's finished, so closing the app doesn't lose the talk. • Read it back with the time of each line, your language and the original. • Search every talk at once, or within one, and filter to the lines you marked. • Share a talk as a PDF or as text, rename it or delete it. WORDS TO EXPECT Before the talk, add the names and terms the speaker will use, like a guide's place names, a pastor's name or this week's vocabulary, and Surtitle gets more of them right. Lists are kept for next time. This doesn't help with Chinese or Japanese. ON IPAD Captions run wide in larger type, with your talks in a sidebar. Hand it to a student or a parent who is new to the language. LANGUAGES The speaker can use Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish or Vietnamese, with a choice of regional accents for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese. You can read the captions in any of those, with Chinese in Simplified or Traditional, or in Hindi, Indonesian, Polish or Ukrainian. Surtitle offers only what Apple runs on the device, so check your languages here before you buy. Names, strong accents and a noisy room can still trip it up, and the translation carries any word it misheard. PRIVACY Surtitle listens only between Start listening and Done, while iOS shows the orange microphone dot. It keeps the text of each talk, never the audio, and nothing leaves your device. Surtitle has no account, ads or tracking. Use it for talks you're free to listen to. PRICE Your first three talks are free, at any length, with every feature. A talk counts once it passes two minutes, and shorter tries are free until they add up to ten minutes, so trying it out doesn't use one up. After that, one purchase, paid once, unlocks as many talks as you like, with no subscription. Either way, you can still read, search and share every talk you've saved. Family Sharing is included. Surtitle needs iOS 26 or later.