AITran, a translation platform spun out of an enterprise product called LINKDOOD, made its public debut at the China-ASEAN Expo in Nanning, aiming at travellers rather than the corporate users it grew up with. The app is available on both the Google Play and Apple stores, and the company says Amazon Web Services provides its cloud infrastructure.

The selling points are translation that is close to immediate, support for several people in one conversation, and software that filters background noise. AITran says the difference from free tools is security inherited from its corporate parent, and its co-founder, Jackie Lin, says the aim was to bring enterprise-grade protection to a consumer app.

Why the setting is the story

The launch was timed to China's National Day holiday, when a large share of the country travels. The company cites figures from the travel agency Ctrip showing outbound bookings up 50 per cent year on year for the break, and argues the holiday was a test of whether the app holds up in use. It says it has already found users in Japan, South Korea and Singapore.

A translation app is judged on one thing: whether it works when the signal is poor, the accent unfamiliar and the stakes higher than a menu. The release offers no user numbers, no price and no independent benchmark, and the phrase military-grade encryption, used to describe the security, is a marketing term rather than a technical standard. A consultant quoted in the release says the point is seamless, secure communication across borders.

Whether translation is a feature every phone will soon include for free, and therefore a hard thing to sell on its own, is the question the launch does not address.