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This summer, Apple added translation and karaoke features to the Apple Music iOS/iPadOS app that are particularly great for songs in non-Latin alphabet languages, such as J-Pop and K-Pop. And now the features have made their way to the Android version of the app.
The features are called Lyric Translation and Lyric Pronunciation respectively, and you’ll find them when you tap on the Lyrics icon for the song you’re listening to. That gives you three choices:
Show Translation, which as you’d expect shows the translated lyrics;
Show Pronuniciation, which shows the phonetic pronunciation of the lyrics;
ADVERTISEMENTand Hide Original, which hides the original-language version of the lyrics so you can focus on the translation or pronunciation.
Why Apple Music’s new Android features are exciting
I’ve been fascinated by the shifting tastes in global music listening since the early 2000s, with Japanese and Korean pop in particular becoming hugely popular globally. For those of us who don’t speak the original languages, being able to see the lyrics translated into our language is a really fun feature – and likely to be funny, because pop lyrics are often terrible no matter which country they originate from.
More practically, these features are great for people learning languages: I know more French from Vanessa Paradis’ pop hit Joe Le Taxi and Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi than I ever learnt in a classroom, because learning through pop is fun, and songs stick in your brain in the same way lessons don’t.
It also gives Apple an advantage over rivals such as Spotify, much of whose J-Pop content is region locked. Apple’s pretty good for global pop, with decent discovery through its pop playlists – one member of the TechRadar team has declared Apple Music to be the “goated” platform for J-Pop now (he’s young), between its far superior library and this new-found guidance for singing along with confidence.
Apple Music’s translation and pronunciation features are available in Apple Music on iOS/iPadOS 26 and version 5 of Apple Music for Android, which is rolling out now.
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