Screengrabbing real time translator tool written in Python 3.8 with tkinter, Pillow, googletrans and pytesseract (Tesseract-OCR) libraries. Useful for translating materials in other languages quickly without having to rely on manual pasting into Google Translate or other services. Can be used to aid novice translators, to chat in a foreign language with others online, to read books and other written materials, to play foreign video games, or to watch media with foreign subtitles.
Functionality:
- Select languages to translate to or from. If no "translate from" language is selected, the program will display "Auto" and attempt to guess what language to translate from.
- Select sample rate. This controls time intervals between image sampling of the selection window area. If translating quickly moving text, increase the sample rate. If updates to the text are rare, lowering the sample rate will increase performance, but this is optional. Sample rate defaults to 1 image taken and translated every 1 second.
- Change the opacity of the selection window. This will allow users to see beneath the window to the original text or hide the selection window entirely (works best with text window).
- Open text window or invert the color of the selection window (black background with white text is the default). These options are disabled unless a selection window is open.
- Select Area button allows user to drag over an area on the screen to create a selection window there.
- Image Options button allows user to adjust image post-processing options to help improve translation quality. This is disabled unless a selection window is open.
- Close Windows button closes all windows except for the main menu window (selection window, text window).
Use the opacity slider to change the transparency of the selection window. Increase the opacity to hide the original text and more easily read the translated text.
Lower the opacity to hide the selection window. This option is best used with the text window. If the text window is opened, the selection window will no longer contain translated text. Instead, the translated text can be viewed on the text window (see Text Window section below).
- Change the Threshold Value to make the sampled text black and white and change the contrast versus the background. This may help in some cases where there are too many subtle variations in image background to get a clear translation because the text is difficult to separate from the background.
- Change the Scale Multiplier of the image to increase the size of the sampled text. In many cases, this helps improve translation.
- Invert the colors of the image if necessary. This may help improve translation quality when combined with other options.
In the following images, the selection window has been hidden by setting the opacity to 0% and a text window has been opened. There are three tabs on the text window:
- Input: User can type in language of choice and translate to the target language (same as language being translated from in the selection window). There is a button to quickly copy the translated text onto the clipboard.
- Translation: User can view the translation of source text seen by the selection window. There is also a button to quickly copy the translated text onto the clipboard.
- Source Text: User can view the source text seen by the selection window directly. There is also a button to quickly copy the translated text onto the clipboard. This is useful in cases where the source text is not copy and pastable, such as in cases where the text is part of an image.
