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Screen Translator

The translation appears right on top of the text on your screen. One hotkey, nothing else.

Download 1.0.9 Source code Windows 10 / 11 · 85 MB · Free

Windows will show a warning — that is expected

The app is not signed with a paid certificate, so the first launch shows the blue "Windows protected your PC" dialog. Click "More info" → "Run anyway". You can verify the file yourself: compare the SHA-256 checksum from the table at the bottom of this page and upload the file to VirusTotal.

What it does

Drawn over the original

Not a side panel — the text stays where it was. Tables, button labels and columns keep their place, and the font size is picked automatically so the translation fits the original box.

One hotkey, any app

Ctrl+Alt+Z selects an area anywhere — a game, a PDF, an app interface, a paused video. Ctrl+Alt+X translates the clipboard, both text and copied images. Both shortcuts can be changed from the tray.

Switch language without re-scanning

Pick another language right in the result window and the same capture is recomputed in a second. The OCR pass is already done; only the translation request is made.

The interface follows your language

Translate into German and the buttons and tray menu turn German too. English, Russian, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and Kazakh are built in.

Glossary for domain terms

Machine translation keeps missing industry wording. Your own replacement rules live in glossary.json and are applied to the finished translation on the fly.

Bring your own key

Free out of the box through public Google endpoints. Plug in a DeepL or Google Cloud key to remove the rate limits and noticeably improve quality.

Why it exists

There are two usual ways to translate what is on your screen. Retype the text into a browser translator. Or take a screenshot, upload it somewhere and get the translation back as one wall of text with the layout gone.

This app does a third thing: it leaves everything in place. A translated line is drawn where the line was; a translated button label sits on the button. That makes the result usable, not just readable — you can see what to click.

How it works

  1. Ctrl + Alt + Z freezes the screen and you drag a selection.
  2. The crop is upscaled and recognised locally through Tesseract. Words are grouped into lines, lines into paragraphs, and separate columns or cards are not glued together.
  3. The text goes to the translator and comes back drawn over the original image, at whatever font size fits the original box.
  4. The result lands in your clipboard right away.

Esc closes the window. Ctrl + scroll zooms. The corner grip at the bottom right resizes the window. Zooming re-renders the image instead of stretching it, so the text stays sharp at any scale.

About languages

The source language is detected automatically. Recognition covers 22 scripts: Latin and Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese and Korean. For Hebrew and Arabic the drawn text is reordered into proper visual order and aligned to the right edge of its block — otherwise the phrase would read backwards.

Requirements

FAQ

Is it free? Any ads or sign-up?
Free, no ads, no account. Nothing leaves your machine except the recognised text, which goes to the translation service to come back translated.
Does it work in games?
Yes, in windowed and borderless-windowed modes. Exclusive fullscreen may block the screen capture — switch the game to windowed mode.
Can I change the keyboard shortcuts?
Yes. Right-click the tray icon → Keyboard shortcuts, click the one you want and press your own keys — it works at once, no restart. A shortcut already taken by another program is not accepted silently; the window says so. A gaming keyboard's G-button works too: map it to F13 in the keyboard's own software — those keys may be assigned on their own, without Ctrl or Alt.
Where does the recognised text go?
The translation is copied to the clipboard automatically. In the result window you can switch between the image, the original text and the translation, and copy any of them.
Do I need internet?
For translation, yes. Text recognition works offline through a local Tesseract, so screenshots of your screen never leave the computer.
Why is the translation sometimes cut off with an ellipsis?
It did not fit the original box even at the smallest font size, and clipping is more honest than overlapping the neighbouring text. The full translation is still in your clipboard and under the "Translation" button.
How do I connect my own DeepL or Google Cloud key?
Right-click the tray icon → «Translation service» → DeepL or Google Cloud. The key window opens by itself and tells you where to get the key: deepl.com/pro-api for DeepL (the Account tab), console.cloud.google.com for Google. A free DeepL key — the one ending in «:fx» — works too. Without a key the app keeps working as before, through free Google.
It sits in the tray and starts with Windows. How do I turn that off?
Right-click the tray icon and untick "Start with Windows". No admin rights involved — it is a per-user registry entry.

Changelog

1.0.9
  • Esc closes the selection right away, even when the shortcut was pressed by mistake; you used to have to drag a frame over empty space
  • The clipboard translation window also closes with Esc right after it opens
1.0.8
  • Translating into English no longer skips lines: German, Spanish, French and other Latin-script text without umlauts or accents used to stay untranslated
  • Part numbers and codes such as EW-200, IPX7 and WPA2-PSK are left as they are instead of being sent to the translator
1.0.7
  • Shortcuts are changed with the mouse: tray → Keyboard shortcuts, click one and press your own — it works at once, no restart
  • A shortcut taken by another program no longer fails silently: the program says so instead of leaving you to guess why the keys do nothing
  • Gaming keyboard G-buttons: F13…F24 can be assigned on their own, without Ctrl or Alt
1.0.6
  • Recognition no longer depends on how large the selection is: the same table used to come out either complete or without its header
  • A mid-sized selection — half a window, part of a page — is now read as fully as a large one
  • The cost is a fraction of a second: a line or a paragraph takes about a quarter second longer
1.0.5
  • Text stopped disappearing from full-window captures: the page is analysed two ways and whatever the first pass missed is taken from the second
  • Line fragments no longer land on top of text already found — the translation is not drawn twice
  • The cost is time: capturing a whole window takes about 1.5 seconds longer, while capturing part of the screen is as fast as before
1.0.4
  • Large text stopped disappearing: whole rows and numbers no longer vanish from tables and scans
  • The recognition scale is chosen from the image itself, and the better of two readings is kept
  • The translation no longer overlaps the neighbouring text
1.0.3
  • Chinese, Japanese and Korean: words are no longer broken up by stray spaces, and the script is detected more reliably
  • Letters stopped disappearing: English "I" and the digit "1" are no longer mistaken for each other
  • A word read with low confidence in the middle of a clear line is no longer discarded
  • The on-screen language can be picked with a button in the result window, without opening the tray menu
  • Language names in the lists follow the interface language
1.0.2
  • The result window can now be dragged in text modes too, by the empty space below the text; the text itself stays selectable
1.0.1
  • Each link in the contact line now opens its own address: Telegram goes to Telegram, the site to the site
  • The version number is visible in the tray tooltip and menu
1.0.0
  • First public release
  • Screen-area and clipboard translation
  • 22 recognition languages, light and dark themes