OCR + Translate - Snipdeck Docs

OCR + Translate reads the text out of a snip with the local OCR engine and translates it into the language of your choice, right next to the capture. It is built for the moment you screenshot something you cannot read — a foreign dialog box, a menu, a line of code comments — and want the meaning without leaving Snipdeck.

Right-click a floating snip or a gallery thumbnail and choose OCR + Translate. A compact, always-on-top popup opens beside the snip and immediately shows a translating… state while the work runs in the background.

Behind the scenes, two steps run on a worker thread so the UI never freezes:

OCR — the snip is read with the local Windows.Media.Ocr engine (the same engine used by OCR + Clipboard). No model download, no network.
Translate — the recognized text is sent to be translated into your chosen target language, and the result is filled into the popup.

The popup opens to the right of the snip, or to its left if the right side would run off the screen, and is always clamped to stay fully on the monitor so it is never clipped at an edge.

Note: Translation needs the network; OCR does not. See The network note for exactly what is sent and where.

The popup is divided into a few clear regions, top to bottom:

Region	What it shows
Title bar	A drag handle (drag it to move the window) and the auto-detected source language followed by an arrow, e.g. `German →`. The close button is on the right.
Target language	The active target language label (in orange) and a More ▾ button that opens the full language list.
Quick-pick pills	A row of one-tap language pills — your favorites — showing short codes like `EN`, `TR`, `DE`. The active target is highlighted in the brand orange.
Source (OCR)	The text the OCR engine recognized, with its own copy button.
Translation	The translated text (or an error), which grows as you resize the window.
Copy translation	A button that copies the translated text to the clipboard.

The window can be dragged by its title bar and resized from the bottom-right grip. A resize sticks across re-opens for the rest of the session.

Picking a target language

There are two ways to choose the language to translate into.

Quick-pick pills

The pill strip holds your favorite languages as compact, one-tap buttons. Tap a pill to switch the target; the popup re-translates the already-recognized text on the fly — it does not re-run OCR — so the new translation appears in a moment. The currently active language stays highlighted.

Tip: If you switch languages while the very first translation is still in flight, Snipdeck re-targets the in-flight result to your newest choice automatically — you never get a stale translation.

The “More” list

Tap More ▾ to open the full list of every supported target language. Each row shows the language name, its code (e.g. zh-CN), and a star for favouriting.

Tap a row to select that language and close the list.
Tap the star to add or remove that language from your quick-pick pills, without selecting it or closing the list.

Supported target languages

Snipdeck offers the following target languages in the More list:

Code	Language	Code	Language
`tr`	Turkish	`ja`	Japanese
`en`	English	`ko`	Korean
`de`	German	`zh-CN`	Chinese (Simpl.)
`fr`	French	`zh-TW`	Chinese (Trad.)
`es`	Spanish	`id`	Indonesian
`it`	Italian	`th`	Thai
`ru`	Russian	`vi`	Vietnamese
`ar`	Arabic	`bg`	Bulgarian
`pt`	Portuguese	`cs`	Czech
`nl`	Dutch	`hu`	Hungarian
`sv`	Swedish	`az`	Azerbaijani
`pl`	Polish	`fa`	Persian
`ro`	Romanian	`he`	Hebrew
`el`	Greek	`hi`	Hindi
`uk`	Ukrainian

The source language is not something you choose: it is auto-detected from the recognized text, and the detected language is shown in the title bar (for example German →).

Favorites

The quick-pick pills are your favorites. Star a language in the More list to add it as a pill; un-star it to remove the pill. Snipdeck always keeps at least one favorite, so the pill strip is never empty.

The default set of favorites is:

["en", "es", "fr", "de", "it", "pt", "ru", "ar"]

Both your default target language and your favorites are remembered in settings and restored next time:

Setting key	Default	Meaning
`translate_target`	`"en"`	The target language the popup starts on
`translate_favs`	`["en","es","fr","de","it","pt","ru","ar"]`	The quick-pick pill languages, in order

These live in:

%APPDATA%\Snipdeck\settings.json

Note: There is no settings window yet. Your last-used target language and favorite changes are persisted automatically as you use the popup — you do not need to edit the file by hand to keep them.

Copying the result

The popup gives you two independent copy actions:

The copy button next to Source (OCR) copies the recognized source text.
The Copy translation button at the bottom copies the translated text.

Both write straight to the Windows clipboard.

The network note

This is the one feature in Snipdeck that uses the network, so it is worth being precise about what leaves your machine.

Only the OCR-recognized text — the plain string the local OCR engine read out of the snip — is sent over the network. The image itself never leaves your machine.
That text is sent to Google’s public translate_a endpoint (translate.googleapis.com/translate_a/single) to be translated, and the translated text is returned.
The recognized text is used for nothing else. It is not stored remotely, logged by Snipdeck, or sent anywhere other than to perform the translation you asked for.

Warning: Because the recognized text is sent to a public translation endpoint, avoid using OCR + Translate on snips containing passwords, tokens, or other sensitive text. OCR and the rest of Snipdeck stay fully local — only this translate step touches the network.

The endpoint is keyless and free, but unofficial: it can be rate-limited or change shape. When that happens the popup degrades gracefully — it shows an error message in red instead of a translation, and you can switch language to retry. If OCR succeeded but translation failed, the recognized source text is still shown so you can copy it.

Opening the translate popup

Anatomy of the popup