4 smartphone apps for international travel

NEW YORK (FOX5NY.COM) - Spring is here, which means that spring break trips will soon commence. If you have international travel plans, certain apps can help you through your visits overseas.

Maps.me is a good app for travelers in unfamiliar cities. Used by over 90 million travelers, maps.me is filled with free, detailed offline maps, which will help you save your mobile data because no internet is required. Search through many categories like restaurants, tourist attractions, hotels, ATMs, and public transportation. Maps me also has an added bonus, according to travel journalist George Hobica.

"It also has a very handy way to track your itinerary through a city," Hobica said. "It allows people to add points of interests. So it's almost like a Wikipedia of maps."

Being able to communicate with the locals is crucial. Speak & Translate is an app to help you converse in the country's native language. With over 50 voice translations and over 100 text translations available, Speak & Translate will help you communicate effectively in any corner of the globe. The app has real-time speech-recognition technology allowing for users to speak into the smartphone and translate quickly.

"It actually does a good job of idiomatic phrases," Hobica said. "I think that's why they are No. 54 in the travel apps in the app store of Apple."

Add some fun to your conversations with the iTranslate Voice app. This app has more than 250 predefined phrases in over 40 languages. You can copy and share the phrases as well as save your favorites.

Possibly more confusing than speaking a foreign language can be spending foreign currency. Easily spend euros and rupees with the xCurrency app. This simply designed currency calculator works offline and automatically updates the latest currency price market. You can check exchange rates for over 200 countries and track their historical rates. And there is also a tutorial to guide you from dollars to yen.