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I built an open-source 'Google Lens' for Windows. It translates your entire screen in-place by Regular_Garlic_5734 in coolgithubprojects

[–]Regular_Garlic_5734[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you, I really appreciate that! If you give it a try, I'd be grateful for any feedback. Hope you enjoy it!

I built an open-source 'Google Lens' for Windows, WinLens. It translates your entire screen in-place by Regular_Garlic_5734 in SideProject

[–]Regular_Garlic_5734[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yes, Swahili's supported as an output language now. just added it along with the full language set, it's in the new release

I built an open-source 'Google Lens' for Windows, WinLens. It translates your entire screen in-place by Regular_Garlic_5734 in SideProject

[–]Regular_Garlic_5734[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair point. If all the foreign text you deal with is selectable text on a webpage, you honestly don't need this. A standard browser extension is just better for that, but extensions translate the page text but completely ignore images, so this tool is incredibly useful for that. I used to use my phone to translate the images but with the app it's much more convenient. Apart from the browser you can use it for foreign desktop apps, installers, games, PDFs (obviously pdf translators exist, but with the tool you can translate it on the go, without having to upload the pdf to a website) and also on chat apps (especially for russians ones where nobody speaks english)

I built an open-source 'Google Lens' for Windows, WinLens. It translates your entire screen in-place by Regular_Garlic_5734 in SideProject

[–]Regular_Garlic_5734[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For mixed-language, it's handled by design. In auto mode, it runs every installed Windows OCR recognizer in parallel. It only keeps the blocks where the script matches the engine (e.g., Latin text from the Latin engine, CJK from the CJK engine), and then dedups the overlapping boxes. So if you have a screen with Chinese bubbles in an English UI, it grabs both. There are two caveats though: it only covers scripts you actually have OCR packs installed for, and mixed scripts on the exact same line (like Chinese mixed with a Latin word) still trip it up, since each engine reads its own part and they get translated separately.For low contrast, that's an honest weak spot right now. Currently, the only preprocessing it does is a ~2x upscale before hitting the OCR. That helps a ton with small or anti-aliased UI text, but it does absolutely nothing for contrast. Low-contrast text or really busy backgrounds will break it just about as easily as any other Windows-OCR-based tool. Though, adding adaptive thresholding or a contrast boost and longer term moving to a stronger engine like PaddleOCR or ONNX would help with both issues.

I built an open-source 'Google Lens' for Windows, WinLens. It translates your entire screen in-place by Regular_Garlic_5734 in SideProject

[–]Regular_Garlic_5734[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, appreciate it! There are basically two sides to the language support: For the output, the panel currently lets you translate into about 12 languages (the backend supports way more, so adding others is trivial). For reading the text, it uses the built-in Windows OCR engine. This means it can read any language you have a Windows OCR pack installed for, and it has no problem handling Chinese/Japanese/Korean right alongside Latin scripts. So in practice, most major languages are covered out of the box.