Easy Screen OCR

Using OCR (optical character recognition) technology in combination with automatic translation to convert images into an editable text format shows its benefits in both personal and business workflows. Manual translation of data from an image is tedious and inefficient, especially if it contains a lot of information. With a text document, you can easily access and edit anything, copy/paste and share it.

The possibility of errors is reduced to a minimum since highly advanced algorithms do the work for you. You won’t need to waste money and time on both converting the images to text and translating them afterwards, and storage space costs are massively reduced due to how lightweight text documents are. When you automatically translate pictures, there’s no more need for manual labor, freeing up the workforce for more important tasks.

The following five tools are the best the industry has to offer.

#1 The iOS Option

The app that started it all, Google Translate has been ahead of all of its competitors. The Instant Camera Translation feature allows users to get an accurate translation in their language of choice by simply pointing their phone at the wanted text. Also, photos can be imported directly into the app for higher quality results in over 50 languages.

The words can be saved into what they call a ‘Phrasebook’ for future use. If the environment is dark or the text is stylized/handwritten, you can expect a less accurate outcome. For the languages you’re not familiar with, there is a ‘Detect Language’ option that will try to recognize the word.

With Google behind its development and every new update bringing new and improving existing features, the future is bright for this translator.

Pros

• Offline support for almost 60 languages

• Instant camera translation in real-time

• Easily save words for future reference

• Completely free

• Powered by Google

Cons

• Downloaded offline languages can take up a lot of space

• Imported images are always in landscape mode, making it harder to highlight specific words

#2 The Online Option

Yandex Translate is a completely web-based tool with a straightforward user interface. You simply drag-and-drop an image onto the screen. The automatically detected words are highlighted in yellow, and clicking on them is going to show its translated counterpart in the language of your selection. Alongside words, there’s an option to highlight lines or blocks, which simply changes how much text is going to be translated with a single click.

The platform supports up to 94 different languages and has an auto language detection feature. If you want to easily copy the text, you’ll have to click on the “Open in Yandex Translate” option that’s going to show a new tab. Unfortunately, there is a limit of 10000 words.

Pros

• Simple user interface

• 94 different languages to choose from

• Completely free

• Lightning quick

• Different highlight options and a zoom in/out feature

Cons

• Text can’t be copied directly from the screen

• 10000 words limit

• Doesn’t have a download/save option

#3 The Creative Option

ImageTranslate puts its focus on an accurate translation of creative posters, advertisements, signboards, and even comics. The end result keeps the same image structure, font and text position as the original. The platform natively supports four different image formats. Conversion usually lasts about 30 seconds, claiming to be 10x faster than traditional methods. Unlike other translators which only recognize and give you raw text, ImageTranslate aims to recreate the whole image from scratch. There’s no shortage of customization options after the translation is done – you can reposition the text, change up its font, alignment, etc. The platform relies on Google Translate for its translations.

Unfortunately, all this comes at a price. There are 5, 20 and 100 image bundles that cost $5, $15 and $50 respectively. They can be used any time you want and have no time limit.

Pros

• Recreates the whole image fairly quickly

• Over 100 languages due to Google Translate

• Supports many formats

• The company creates custom plans for large businesses

• No time limits

Cons

• Not free

• Translations can sometimes be inaccurate

• Images can’t be deleted from the account

#4 The Android Option

The No.1 picture translator on Google Play, TextGrabber uses the phone camera’s lenses to capture and recognize text in real-time. One of the main selling points is that it works even without an Internet connection. Real-time translation doesn’t require you to take pictures but rather translates it directly from the screen using the ABBYY Mobile Capture SDK. It supports 10 languages offline and more than 100 otherwise.

The app automatically copies the translated text to the clipboard for easy text-to-speech use. The end result can be saved onto the device as a text file. E-mail addresses and phone numbers become clickable on-screen. In the end, you can share the results through messages, social media or any other method supported by your Android version.

Pros

• Works even when offline

• Real-time recognition

• Offline support of 60+ languages for images, 10 for real-time recognition

• Results easy to share

• Autocopy for TTS

Cons

• Subscription-based app

• Real-time recognition is buggy for languages other than English

• The written text won’t be recognized correctly in most cases

#5 The Windows Option

Maybe you found an interesting picture caption or an intriguing article that you didn’t have time to read so you took a screenshot of it. Retyping all that can be a pain, and translating foreign words is even more time-consuming. Fortunately, EasyScreenOCR is a lightweight yet reliable screenshot translator that supports more than 100 different languages. You can either capture directly from the tool or drag-and-drop an existing screenshot.

The tool has two OCR language modes, one of them being from Google, so you can switch between them for best results. The end result can be saved as both an image and a PDF file. The program is completely unobtrusive as it sits in your toolbar, with a simple-to-use interface. You won’t even notice that it’s installed since it takes up less than 6MB of HDD space.

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How To Use It