Chinese is uniquely hard to type if you don't already read it: there's no alphabet to spell with, no spaces between words, and a single character you can't look up stops you cold. That's the case for a camera translator — you point instead of type.
Signs, menus, labels → camera
Point a camera translator at the characters and the English paints in place. This is the fastest way to read a menu, a street sign, a product label or a train departure board — the things you meet as objects, not as text you can copy.
It handles both Simplified (mainland China, Singapore) and Traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong) characters, and a good one works offline, which matters behind the Great Firewall and anywhere signal is thin. The menu method is the same as for a Japanese menu.
Photos and screenshots → import
Already have the image — a screenshot of an app, a photo someone sent, a page you can't select? Import it into the translator and get the same in-place result without re-shooting.
Text you can select → paste, and keep the pinyin
For a message or caption you can select, paste it into a text translator for the cleanest result — it reads exact characters instead of recognising them from pixels. Turn on pinyin (the romanization with tone marks) so you can actually say what you're reading. Tones matter in Chinese: mā / má / mǎ / mà are four different words.
Speaking → voice
For asking or ordering, a voice translator listens in English and speaks Mandarin back. Tones make Chinese speech recognition sensitive to noise, so a quiet spot helps.
Why "in place" matters more for Chinese
Because Chinese runs characters together with no word boundaries, a translation dropped in a separate box makes it hard to map English back to what you're looking at. Painting the English over the characters, keeping the layout, is what lets you actually use a menu or follow a sign.
On-device and private
Translating on your phone means it works with no connection and nothing you scan gets uploaded — genuinely useful in mainland China. The full method-by-method breakdown (and the on-device vs. cloud trade-off) is in how to translate Japanese to English; it applies directly to Chinese.
Yomi reads Chinese — Simplified and Traditional — through the camera, from photos, and as text, offline on your iPhone. Point it at the characters and they become English where they sit.