Navigating the Metro Made Easy: Paris App Helps Foreign Visitors During Olympics!

In preparation for the upcoming Olympic Games, the Paris metro has introduced a real-time translation application to assist foreign visitors in navigating the complex urban transport system of the French capital. With over 300 stations, many of which have challenging names to locate or pronounce, even locals can struggle, making it particularly daunting for non-French speakers.

The Summer Olympics, which will be held in the French capital from July 26 to August 11, will bring millions of visitors to the capital who do not speak French or even English, most of whom will travel between the sports venues by public transport.

It comes with the Tradivia app, a quick translation app that can handle 16 languages and which the metro operator RATP has equipped 6,000 employees at the network’s stations with.

The app translates spoken queries, including English, German, Mandarin, Hindi and Arabic, into French for the benefit of RATP agents, whose responses are then translated back into the visitor’s language.

“We had a real problem here because our agents cannot be expected to respond to queries in all languages,” said Valerie Gaidot, RATP’s customer experience manager.

Tailored specifically for the Paris Metro experience, the app knows station names, itineraries, and different ticket and travel ticket types that can confuse tourists.

According to RATP, this is a decisive advantage compared to a general translation aid such as Google Translate, which sometimes does not understand the idiosyncrasies of the metro.

After first trying three city lines, the operator introduced the service on the entire network during the summer.

In addition, four languages – English, German, Italian and Spanish – currently have special announcements on the platform, with Mandarin and Arabic added before the Olympics.

About 15 million people are expected in Paris and its surrounding areas for the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.