Official Yandex Translate bot: send text and get a translation with automatic language detection, or use it inline in any chat. Free, dozens of languages, strong on Russian.
Free bots for Translators
These Telegram bots translate text, voice messages, and photos with text on them between languages, for reading foreign chats, replying to international contacts, and understanding signs or menus from a photo.
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The official Telegram bot of PROMT, a veteran Russian machine-translation company: send text or forward a whole channel post to translate it across 16 languages, with automatic language detection.
74 / 100
Score
A free multilingual translator bot that also reads text from photos and turns vocabulary practice into quizzes — handy when a phrase, a menu photo, or a word list needs translating fast.
The Telegram front-end for Lingvanex's translation engine: send text for an instant translation, ask for a word's definition, or have the result read aloud, across a very wide language list.
64 / 100
Score
A compact Russian-English dictionary bot built on ABBYY's Lingvo word database — send one or two words and get a proper dictionary-quality translation, not a full-sentence translator.
61 / 100
Score
A free, wide-coverage translator bot (reportedly 180+ languages) with a bare-bones Telegram profile — solid if you need an obscure language pair, but verify results carefully since there's little public information about who runs it.
54 / 100
Score
Comparison
| # | Bot | Price | Languages | Inline | Groups | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yandex Translate @YTranslateBot | Free | RU · EN · MULTI | yes | yes | 83 |
| 2 | PROMT.Translate @translaterubot | Free | RU · EN · UK · MULTI | no | no | 74 |
| 3 | Perebot @perebot | Free | RU · MULTI | no | no | 71 |
| 4 | Lingvanex Translator @lingvanexbot | Free | EN · RU · MULTI | no | no | 64 |
| 5 | Lingvo @LingvoBot | Free | RU · EN | no | no | 61 |
| 6 | Translo @translobot | Free | RU · MULTI | no | no | 54 |
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How we chose
We tested every bot with the same scenario: 5 phrases translated into 3 languages each, including one with an idiom and one with technical terms, one voice message to transcribe and translate, and one photo containing text — a sign or a menu — to translate via OCR. We timed replies and checked the free daily limit before a paywall or ad appeared.
Translators
How to choose a translator bot
Test with a phrase that doesn't translate literally — an idiom, a piece of slang, or a sentence with cultural context — rather than a simple greeting, since every bot handles "hello, how are you" well and that tells you nothing. Also check language coverage beyond the obvious pairs: a bot that translates well between English and Spanish can still be weak on Russian, Chinese, or Arabic, where grammar and word order differ more.
Where machine translation still fails
Voice translation adds a second point of failure on top of the text model: the bot first has to transcribe your speech correctly, and any mishearing carries straight through into a wrong translation, so accents and background noise hurt voice translation more than typed text. Photo translation (OCR) struggles with handwriting, stylized fonts, and text at an angle — a restaurant menu in cursive script is a much harder test than a printed street sign, so try both before trusting it while traveling.
Free limits and offline use
Free tiers usually cap you by character count or number of requests per day rather than by language pair, commonly somewhere around 1,000–5,000 characters daily. None of these bots work fully offline, since translation happens on a server — if you need a translator without mobile data, for instance abroad without roaming, a phone's built-in offline translation app is more reliable than any Telegram bot.
Frequently asked questions
Does the bot translate voice messages, not just text?
Yes — some bots translate voice by first transcribing the speech to text and then translating it, so the final accuracy depends on how clear the recording is.
Can the bot translate text from a photo, like a menu or a sign?
Yes — many translator bots include photo OCR, but accuracy drops on handwriting, decorative fonts, or text at an angle.
Does a translator bot work without an internet connection?
No — translation happens on the bot's server, so it's unavailable offline; a phone's built-in offline translation app is a better fit for that.