Unauthoritative Pronouncements

This is another WWDC 2024 video that caught my eye. A few months ago I wrote about using some of Apple and Google’s features when I was traveling abroad in Japan.

One of those issues was that reviews for locations in Apple Maps were in Japanese, which is great if you’re a local in Japan, or a traveler who can speak Japanese. Data sources appeared to mostly be Tablelog. Each review needed to be tapped into to select the text to do a translation of that individual review, or you could go to the Tablelog website and use the “ᴀA” menu to select the translate page option and translate all the reviews on the page at once. You’d then have to go back up the navigation hierarchy to look at another location and repeat the steps.

So I was surprised to see that one of the demos in the WWDC 2024 translation video was for translating Japanese reviews in a the sample hiking app to English inline with the source text without having to translate each review one at a time.

I wondered if that would be coming to Maps in iOS 18 (I’m not installing the developer beta, but you do you), but when I went back to the same locations that had Japanese reviews from Tablelog, they were now being pulled from TripAdvisor or Yelp.

Huh.

I doubt that was in direct response to my kvetching, but it is certainly behaving differently than it was at the time I wrote that up. Now I wonder if Apple Maps will eventually get a feature that could translate those Tablelog reviews inline, or if the Apple Maps team considers the matter closed because they have the TripAdvisor and Yelp reviews?