This Google Translate tool has completely changed the way I travel

Ariel Schwartz/Tech Insider

One of the many vistas in Rio de Janeiro.

I love traveling in Brazil. But it's a country where few people speak fluent English, and if you don't have a Portuguese-speaking companion (and you venture outside tourist zones), it can be difficult to get around.

On my most recent trip to the South American country, the Google Translate app changed all that.

For the most part, I actually had a human translator with me, since I was conducting interviews with locals. When I was alone, I whipped out the app - and discovered, to my delight, a feature that Google added this past summer: the ability to get instant translations of written text.

All you have to do is open up the app, select the languages you're translating from (English) and to (Portuguese, in this case), and watch the translation happen.

The feature was most useful in restaurants, where I had little clue what was on the menu and didn't feel like an awkward tourist taking out my phone and puzzling over the translations. As a vegetarian visiting a fellow meat-loving nation, I'm pretty sure that the app saved me from numerous accidental meat eating incidents.

The one big caveat for me: As in many countries, cellular connectivity in Brazilian cities isn't always strong, As a result, the instant translations didn't always work. When they did work, it was often just for a second or two before disappearing. 

So, in addition to making it difficult for me to get usable screenshots for the purposes of this article, I also didn't always get the gist of the instant translations. Here's how the service should work under ideal circumstances: 

 For those times when the cell phone network lagged too much to use the feature, I used Google Translate's camera mode - taking a picture of the text, highlighting it with my finger, and waiting for the translation. That worked for the most part. Occasionally, there were some gaffes:

Ariel Schwartz/Tech Insider

Still, it was always understandable enough.

Think of it like this: Having the instant translate capability - and, to a lesser extent, camera mode - is like magically gaining a child's understanding of a language. In real-world situations, it's not perfect. But it can make you a much more savvy traveler.