A quick note on the translation aspect. On my Japan trip, I used Google Translate and it worked ok, but switching to Claude was a game-changer. You could just send it a photo of the menu (sometimes pulled from Google Maps) and it would translate it much more accurately than Google Translate and also explain the various dishes if you want. I mentioned this to my friend Matt and he suggested you could even have it convert the prices to USD. Not sure how well this would work for Mandarin, but it was fantastic for Japanese.

I was just in China in May. Everything runs on either Alipay or WeChat. Very often you can use either in the same situation. Both are not just payment apps but front ends for most other services, like subway passes, restaurant ordering, tickets, bike rentals (blue bikes are Alipay, yellow are WeChat), etc. I mostly ended up using Alipay, but either are fine.

Agree with setting up the apps at home. You'll need to connect your credit cards and enter your passport info into Alipay and WeChat to verify your identity. This latter step is not obvious at first glance. You can easily google up help though. Don't skip this step or you'll have a some extra hassle dealing with once you arrive.

Apple maps worked fine for me. Google stuff is useless there.

Most Chinese people will whip out their phones and use a voice-activated translation app to talk with you if they don't have any English.

Trip.com was very useful.

Seconding the recommendation for Airalo. I used Let's as my vpn and it worked fine. You'll need to toggle it on when you get onto your hotel's wifi, and back off again when you switch to your Airalo data. Finally, you might want to check on the r/chinatravel subreddit before you go, since the tech changes so quickly that this advice will quickly be out of date.