Translate image: the words in a picture, read and translated here

What this tool does, exactly

The words in the picture are read and translated in this browser tab; the picture never leaves this device. The reader finds each block of text — a screenshot's paragraphs, a letter, a label, a menu — and your browser's own translator, in Chrome 138 or Edge 148 and newer on a laptop or desktop, translates it beside the original. Both sides are editable, and the translation copies or downloads as text.

What it does

Finds every block of text in the picture, numbers the blocks in reading order and passes each one to your browser's translator. Every recognised block can be corrected, and the translation follows the correction. Edit what was read and translate that block again. The downloads are the translation as plain text, blocks separated by blank lines, and as Markdown.

Where the translation happens

In the translator built into your browser, on this device. The first time you translate a pair of languages, the browser downloads that pair's language pack from its own vendor, and the status line shows the download. That request is the browser's, not this page's, and it carries nothing of your picture.

Which browsers

Translating needs Chrome 138 or Edge 148 and newer, on a laptop or desktop. Anywhere else — Safari, a phone, an older browser — the page says so before you choose a picture, still reads the text out of it, and leaves it ready to copy into any translator you trust.

What it cannot do yet

It does not set the translation back into the picture, and it takes one picture at a time: both are behind the buttons under the result, in preview. The reader knows the Latin alphabet, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian Cyrillic; Korean, Arabic, Greek, Thai and Devanagari text is not read yet. A photograph taken at an angle or in poor light reads noticeably worse than a screenshot, and handwriting has not been measured.

What it costs to load

The reader is about sixteen megabytes the first time, cached by your browser afterwards; it reads an A4 page in about 0.6 seconds on a graphics chip, measured on an Apple M4 Mac. Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian need a second recogniser, eight megabytes more, fetched when you choose one of them in From. The language pack is the browser's own download.