One of the most brilliant and necessary resources for travelers is Google Translate, a free app that goes along way toward erasing language barriers. 

Two years ago, Google added neural machine translation to Google Translate, which is super advanced computer science that helps make translations more accurate.  

I won't bore you with the technical mumbo-jumbo about how all this works (nor do I fully understand it myself). In practice, neural machine translation gives you better translations. 

The processing behind nearal machine translation took place on powerful remote Google servers, so you needed an active connection to the internet to use it. 

Trouble is, when you're traveling, you're less likely to have such a connection -- or a low-cost connection. 

That's why I'm thrilled by the news that Google is bringing neural machine translation to the offline version of Translate -- the advanced processing will take place on your phone even when it's not connected. 

My advice: Use Google Translate! And make sure you open the Translate app on your phone in advance and download all the goodies for whatever language you're going to be translating. That's how you get the new capability. 

Also note that while the new offline translation is better than the old one thanks to this new feature, it's still not as good as the online version. So use Translate while connected when it's possible or reasonable to do so. 

The offline neural machine translation feature will be rolled out for 59 languages over the next few days, so make sure you get it!