Submitted 2 weeks ago by DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
You must be very young, I’m not trying to start shit. Auto-translation became a semi-functional feature around a decade plus after smart phones existed. At first we just had very basic apps. Look funny and drink beer or see the stars from a GPS location on your phone.
It’s still not perfect but we’re getting there. Your assumption that apps magically existed and worked is adorable. Progress takes time.
Oh lol I just remembered the first smartphone was invented in like 2007 (as in, actual mass market product, not just prototypes), I had my first in 2015, so probably warped worldview lol. Like my parent were still using flip phones in early 2010s and this was also around the time when I first had internet access (didn’t have internet in my neighborhood in my previous country).
I always forget and thought smartphones were invented in like 2013 or something, since that’s the first time I see one, my aunt had one that I just played with during family gatherings. Pretty sure I remember Google Translate to be an app already.
But I mean like smartphones paved the way for these tools to exist ubiquitiously, not as in these tools immediately existed upon the invention of smartphones, know what I sayin’?
If you’re going to end your sentences with “lol” you don’t also need to say that you’re Gen Z. One or the other will do. 😏
I agree your original point stands, regardless of the timescales involved.
The invention of the smart phone did make international travel less intimidating, even if some of the functions took a while to appear.
I once missed a call from my mother on my cell phone because it was getting late…
I got in trouble due to the fact I didn’t call her back.
The phone didn’t have caller ID on it… so I had no idea who had called. All it said one 1 missed call.
Cell phone tech has definitely been a process.
Smartphones are much older than that. Symbian Series 60 had a substantial install base long before the iPhone. The N-Gage was a smart phone, for example, so we’re not just talking high end stuff.
Believe it or not the first production smart phone was released by IBM in 1989, it was the bastard lovechild of a DOS PC and a car phone; it could do fax and modem over the phone. Blackberry put out a device you’d call a smart phone (runs an extensible OS with an app ecosystem, multimedia capable, mobile data as we know it today) in 2002. But yes the iPhone arrived in 2007 much to the unhealth of society.
The original iPhone did not have an app store.
The iPhone was released in 2007, and the Google Translate app for iOS and Android had the feature to point the phone’s camera at text to auto-translate it around 2010.
Wikipedia has google translate (2006) pre-dating android (2008) by 2 years. Iphone was 2007. It has improved significantly since, but it was pretty good even then. Adequate enough to communicate with foreign language speakers. I used to use it to email a japanese penpal, and while it may not have been perfect, it was understandable even then.
Yeah the problem came with verbal communication, you can’t transcribe a language you don’t understand, and good luck getting a stranger to type sentences on your smartphone (at a time when most people didn’t have one), you mostly got garbage translations. When speech-to-text got good enough for on the spot translation, that was a game changer, but that had to be around 2015 or something.
That’s assuming you had a connection at all, at the time you paid for connection DURATION, not traffic, so you were offline most of the time. And roaming data had impossible costs.
The early smartphone era was wild. Motorola made the very first phone with iTunes on it for example
Smartphones made an incredible change. We used to plan trips months or even years in advance. Mailing to foreign embassies for visas, gathering maps, buying travelor’s cheques, making reservations by mail, researching by borrowing books from the library - all took a lot of time and effort.
Travelling has changed a lot.
It’s become way more accessible. Not a lot of people used to travel for leisure. But now it seems almost everyone except the poorest do it. There are a lot more businesses that cater to tourists in every city/town nowadays.
Smartphones have taken a lot of fun out of it too though. There’s almost no challenge to it anymore and thus less a sense of adventure. At least for me.
And everyone is doing selfies and streaming the landscape instead of watching itself. It‘s like being in a country just for the audience.
That was already visible with digital pocket cameras around late 90ies. Cost of photgraphy went to zero.
I find this the weirdest part of reading old travel accounts, like from the 16th century or something. When travel really was a completely different beast. They never talk about getting lost or language barriers as being the big problems. The biggest problem is always getting sick or accidents.
And looking at my own life and traveling before smart or even mobile phones existed. I feel exactly the same. I always knew where I had to go, even if I had to search for it. And I was always able to get around and buy things without speaking a word. Just gestures and an attempt at learning a few simple words.
But I always had something to fall back on. A landline. A travel agency. A random person that shared a language. I always was curious how travel went before those things existed. And now to see a next generation being curious about how travel was before another thing to fall back on.
The thing to fall back on just gets more and more competent. From having to use a post system that took weeks to get an answer back. To being able to call anyone anywhere anytime. I think every step has made travel easier, less intimidating, and cheaper.
Those who could afford to travel, especially for leisure, had no communication problems because either they spoke some kind of court language (French) or Greek/Latin I guess.
People are talking about how smartphones didn’t have those features at first, but I just carried around a 2 language dictionary when I was traveling before translation apps were a thing. I’m not sure if they’re exactly the same everywhere, but I also always found reading an atlas/map to transfer pretty easily from one country to another (across North America and Europe, so there could be much greater variation in the world than I saw).
It sounds harder and it was, but only a little. You already knew how to read maps and at least you didn’t have to worry about a battery.
As someone who traveled extensively before and after, it’s a huge difference. I traveled Europe for 6 months with no mobile phone whatsoever. Only paper maps and pay phones and no hotel reservations. That was a proper adventure. Now there’s essentially nothing that can go wrong.
Yeah, I miss the adventure part of learning a new city with just a handful of polite words to get you by. I’ve also noticed that pretty much everywhere I go there are plenty of people who speak English so less of a reason to learn another language. I still enjoy finding my way around a new city without a map though, and that is easy to keep doing, you just don’t pull out your phone to look at the map.
I still enjoy finding my way around a new city without a map though
Heck this is a blast even at home. If I’m given an address in a small town it’s pretty fun to just drive around and try to find the address without looking it up
Not just international travel but travel in general.
And if it is only going to the next big town by bike, knowing that you could phone someone and just tell him exactly where you are.
I had fun being (figuratively) feeling lost in school and didn’t speak English, and the American-Born Chinese classmates barely spoke Cantonese and I kinda feel like they felt annoyed that they had to translate for me (just my perception of what they thought of me… maybe it’s just me being introverted). And I’m just in this classroom… and this teacher is talking… and idk what the fuck is happening… I’m halfway cross the world from my spawnpoint and like… everything is giberish.
I was 2010 and I don’t think teachers had Google Translate yet.
So yea I know the “fun” xD.
I also remember just exploring NYC via traveling using the subway system… like we’d visit various places… just randomly decide to go to Bronx one time, to Queens, Flushing, go to Coney Island Beach, just going to the F and Q trains just like go sightseeing lol, like look outside the window of the train (for the segments its abobe ground), like this is a city with so many people, but its only me and my mother in this little bubble because we barely spoke English for the first few years, and they didn’t have smartphones all this time… eventually I did learn English and so I kinda became my parent’s go-to translator lol.
Such memorable times, Iiked that version of my mother… I think she just got so fed up with me when I got older, I got less adorable and more annoying… 🙃
One of my most memorable moments were at Urumqi 2006. A town in China were me as a Westener felt absolutely alien. Street and shop signs were in Chinese letters, Russian letters and Islamic letters. No chance to get an idea.
And over there my Visa debit card stopped working at the ATM‘s. I quickly ran out of money. And my visa needed an extension. And I needed money to get it and my passport back. And I had just a single box of salty crackers left. But I got out of the muddle ;)
Conversely, the rise of social media (enabled by ubiquitous smartphones) has really impacted tourism negatively. Try sitting in a historical site trying to appreciate the ambience while someone does a TikTok dance in front of you. Could be a religious site, museum, or Auschwitz.
There is probably truth to what you say but I will point out that people used to get pocket guides to carry around that explained how things worked in the target country and provided basic phrases for ordering in restaurants, saying thank you, and such.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Smart phones didn’t start with those features.
…he said, oldly.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Me, in Rome with my Blackberry on Verizon Wireless: “oh fuck, nothing works”
Munkisquisher@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
Pre travel sims, we had multi dollar per megabyte roaming fees. Smart phones were only any good when you could find a McDonald’s to steal some wifi from.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Smartphones with WiFi came waaaaay later!