BiangBiang Hanzi
The free Chinese to Pinyin and Cantonese Jyutping translator and OCR app for iPhone and Android.
Convert Chinese Hanzi to Pinyin or Cantonese Jyutping in seconds
BiangBiang Hanzi is a free, native mobile app that turns Chinese characters (汉字, Hanzi) into Pinyin (Mandarin) or Jyutping (Cantonese) with accurate tone marks. Paste or type any Chinese text — a poem, a menu, a chat message, a textbook paragraph — and get the romanized pronunciation instantly. Switch between Simplified, Traditional, and Cantonese variants in Settings. Non-Chinese characters such as Latin letters, numbers, punctuation and emoji are preserved in place, so mixed-language text stays readable.
The app is built natively for both platforms: a SwiftUI version for iPhone and iPad, and a Jetpack Compose version for Android. There is no shared cross-platform layer, which means each app feels at home on its operating system and uses the OS-level translation engines for speed and offline support.
Scan Chinese text with OCR from photos and live camera
Point your phone at a Chinese sign, restaurant menu, book page or product label and BiangBiang Hanzi will read the characters for you. The OCR engine — Apple Vision on iOS and Google ML Kit on Android — recognizes Simplified and Traditional Chinese in real time from the camera feed, and also works on photos from your gallery. Each detected character is overlaid with its Pinyin reading, making it easy to study, pronounce, or look up unfamiliar Hanzi on the spot.
Translate Mandarin Chinese to your language
Beyond pronunciation, BiangBiang Hanzi can translate Mandarin Chinese text into your preferred language using on-device translation: the iOS Translation framework on iPhone and Google ML Kit Translate on Android. Translations run locally once the language pack is downloaded, so the app keeps working without an internet connection and without sending your text to a third-party server. Translation is available for Mandarin only — Cantonese mode provides Jyutping romanization without translation.
Who is it for?
- Mandarin Chinese learners who need quick Pinyin readings while studying.
- Cantonese learners who want Jyutping romanization for Hanzi.
- Travelers in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore or Malaysia who need to read signs and menus.
- Teachers and students who work with Chinese textbooks, flashcards, or handwritten notes.
- Anyone who receives Chinese messages, documents or photos and wants to understand them.
Key features
- Hanzi to Pinyin conversion with tone marks (mā, má, mǎ, mà, ma).
- Hanzi to Cantonese Jyutping conversion (e.g. nei5 hou2 for 你好).
- Support for Simplified, Traditional, and Cantonese variants.
- OCR from photos and from the live camera feed.
- On-device translation of Mandarin Chinese into many target languages.
- Privacy-friendly: text and images stay on your device.
- Free to download on the App Store and Google Play.
- Native iOS (SwiftUI) and Android (Jetpack Compose) apps.
Why it is called BiangBiang Hanzi
The app is named after biáng (𰻝), one of the most complex Chinese characters in existence — used to write the name of biángbiáng noodles (𰻝𰻝面), a famous dish from Shaanxi province. It is a fitting mascot for an app that takes complicated Hanzi and makes them easy to read.