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Lost in the metro? Paris translation app aims to help visitors

The Paris metro has launched an instant translation app ahead of next year's Olympic Games to help hapless foreign visitors navigate the French capital's urban transport system.

Published: 27 November 2023 18:07 CET

Lost in the metro? Paris translation app aims to help visitors

The sign above an entrance of a Metro station in Paris. (Photo by STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN / AFP)

The meandering metro, featuring more than 300 stations whose names can be hard to find or pronounce even for natives, easily becomes a nightmare for anybody without fluent French.

The Summer Olympics, to be held in the French capital between July 26 and August 11, will bring millions of visitors without knowledge of French or even English to the capital, most of whom will be using public transport to shuttle between sports venues.

READ MORE: The essential smartphone apps you need for living in France

In comes Tradivia, an instant translation app able to handle 16 languages, with which metro operator RATP has equipped 6,000 of its staff across the network’s stations.

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

“We had a real issue here, because our agents can’t be expected to answer queries in all languages,” said Valerie Gaidot, customer experience head at RATP.

The app has been specifically tailored to the Paris metro experience, and knows its way around station names, itineraries and the various ticket and travel pass types that can leave tourists bewildered.

This, RATP said, is a decisive advantage over general translation help like Google Translate that sometimes fails to make sense of the metro’s idiosyncrasies.

After experimenting on three urban lines first, the operator rolled out the service across the network over the summer.

In addition, four languages — English, German, Italian and Spanish — are currently available for special platform announcements, with Mandarin and Arabic to be added before the Olympics.

Some 15 million people are expected in Paris and surrounding regions for the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.

READ MORE: Hotels, tickets and scams: What to know about visiting Paris for the 2024 Olympics

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What is considered a good salary in Paris?

Centrist Renaissance candidate Sylvain Maillard, running for re-election in France’s snap parliamentary elections, was trying to highlight the high cost of living in the capital in a debate on RMC Radio

“You have extremely expensive rents [in Paris], between €1,500 and €1,700, and then there are all the charges and taxes to pay,” he said.

But what most people seized on was his comment that anyone earning €4,000 a month after tax would not be considered rich in Paris – he predictably was accused of being out of touch with French people’s lives.

There’s no doubt that €4,000 a month is good salary that most people would be happy with – but how much do you need to earn to be considered ‘rich’ in Paris?

National averages

Earlier this year, the independent Observatoire des Inégalités calculated poverty and wealth levels in France.

READ ALSO How much money do you need to be considered rich in France?

According to its calculations, to be considered ‘rich’ in France, a single person with no dependants needs to earn more than €3,860 per month, after taxes and social charges. Around eight percent of single workers have this sum deposited into their bank balance every month, it said.

A total of 23 percent of workers take home €3,000 or more every month, while the top 10 percent clear €4,170.

To be in the top one percent of earners in France in 2024, one person must bring in at least €10,000 per month. After taxes and social charges.

The median income – the median is the ‘middle value’ of a range of totals – of tax households in mainland France is €1,923 per month after taxes and social charges, according to INSEE 2021 data, which means that a ‘rich’ person earns about twice as much as a person on the median income, according to the Observatoire.

Paris situation

About 75 percent of people living in Paris earn less than €4,458 per month, according to Insee data – so according to those calculations, 25 percent of Parisians earn the equivalent of the top 10 percent in France.

But that city-wide average still hides a wide degree of variation. In the sixth arrondissement, the median income is €4,358 per month, after tax. In the seventh, it’s €4,255. Further out, those bringing home €4,600 a month in the 19th and 20th arrondissements are among the top 10 percent in wealth terms.

But still, the median income in Paris is €2,639, significantly higher than the €1,923 France-wide median.

That would mean – using the Observatoire des Inégalités’ starting point for wealth – that a Paris resident, living on their own, would have to bring home €5,278 per month to be considered ‘rich’.

France is a heavily centralised country, with many of the highest-paying industries concentrated within the capital, meaning there is much more opportunity to secure a high-wage job if you live in Paris.

Cost of living

Even these figures should all be taken with a pinch of salt because of the relatively high cost of living in the capital, compared to elsewhere in France. Paris is objectively an expensive place to call home.

In 2023, France Stratégie published a report on the disposable income of French households, after housing, food and transport costs were deducted. It found that, on average, people living in the Paris region had more left to spend, due to higher incomes and despite the fact that housing costs more.

It’s the income paradox in action. A person with a take-home salary of €4,000 per month has more money to spend if they live and work outside Paris. But they’re much more likely to earn that much if they live and work in Paris, where it’s not as valuable.

Someone who earns a ‘rich-level’ salary in Paris might not appear rich – because they live in an expensive area, and a surrounded by very wealthy people in property that’s out of reach all-but the fattest of wallets. But they’re still earning more than twice the median income in France.

And that’s what Sylvain Maillard was getting at, clumsily as he may have expressed it.

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