We're launching a real-time translation platform for Chinese tour groups in Ireland (no app required)

Hi everyone, I'm the Founder and Chairperson of ICCTA (Ireland China Culture and Tourism Association), based in Dublin. Our focus is helping destinations and tourism operators better serve Chinese visitors.

We launched a real-time tour guide translation platform that helps local English-speaking guides deliver live Chinese translations to visiting Chinese tour groups through a simple QR-code browser experience, without requiring any app installation.

We intentionally built it to do one thing well: no app, no registration, just scan, listen and follow. Although we're currently using it for English → Chinese, the same approach can be applied to many other languages and visitor experiences.

Our current trial platform is available at go.cits.ie

Here's some more details about the project:

Over the past few years working in tourism, I've noticed something interesting: many people assume the biggest challenge for international visitors is language, but in reality, that's rarely the problem. The real challenge is live commentary. I've seen it happen in two very common situations.

The first is on organised group tours. Most Chinese groups already travel with a Chinese-speaking tour leader, so communication throughout the journey is usually smooth. The challenge begins when the group arrives at a museum, castle, distillery, river cruise, or heritage site and a local guide takes over. That's exactly what should happen — the local guide knows the stories, the history, and the culture better than anyone else, and their commentary is often the highlight of the visit. But it's incredibly difficult for the tour leader to manage a group while translating every sentence in real time. The guide can't stop after every sentence, and the tour shouldn't lose its natural rhythm. As a result, visitors hear the guide speaking, but often miss the stories that make the place memorable.

The second situation is becoming even more common. More travellers now join local walking tours, museum tours, river cruises, food tours, and other English-language experiences directly. Many of them have perfectly good conversational English — ordering food, asking for directions, or checking into a hotel isn't a problem. But live guiding is different. The guide speaks naturally, the pace is fast, the accent is local, and historical references and place names come one after another. Visitors don't fail because they don't know English; they simply can't keep up.

That made me wonder: could understanding be made effortless? Not by changing the guide's workflow. Not by asking visitors to download an app. Not by creating another registration process. Simply by making the technology almost invisible.
So we built a very simple browser-based tool. The guide shares a QR code, visitors scan it — that's it. No app, no registration, no compatibility issues. The guide continues speaking exactly as they always have, and visitors continue enjoying the experience, only now they can follow the story as it unfolds.

Although we originally built it with Chinese visitors in mind, we quickly realised this isn't really about one language. It's about helping international visitors feel included wherever live commentary happens: river cruises, museums, walking tours, visitor attractions, universities, business delegations, conferences — anywhere people gather to learn from someone speaking in real time.

We're beginning to think of it less as a translation tool and more as a browser-based Visitor Experience Platform. Live translation is simply the first use case. The same approach could support multilingual visitor information, guided experiences, event content, educational visits, and many other situations where understanding should feel effortless. Because in the end, visitors rarely remember the technology — they remember the story.

I'm curious how others are approaching this challenge. If you work with international visitors, how do you help them follow live commentary today? I'd love to hear what's working in your part of the world.