SevDev
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Screen Translator

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

Download 1.0.1 Source code Windows 10 / 11 · 85 MB · Free

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.

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

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 above and upload the file to VirusTotal.

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.
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.
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

1.0.1
  • 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