Press a hotkey, drag over any text on screen, read it in your language.
In OldSnap that’s Ctrl 1, drag, then Y. The translation is drawn over the original text, in the same spot.
Windows 10 / 11, 64-bit, no admin rights. Translating needs a free account and an internet connection.
Anything you can see on your screen, as long as the text is in a script OldSnap can read. The list is further down.
Plenty of games never get an English or Chinese release. Select the dialogue box or the quest log and press Y, and the lines come back in your language on the game screen. Best in borderless or windowed mode, with Japanese, Chinese or Latin-alphabet text. Korean isn’t read yet.
Amazon Seller Central, Shopee Seller Centre, the English ERP your company bought, a router’s settings page. You rarely need every word, just which button does what. Translate the part you’re stuck on and keep working.
Browser translation only works on real text in a web page. A scanned contract, a product photo, subtitles burned into a video, a PDF made of page images: none of these have text for it to grab. OldSnap reads the pixels instead.
A supplier sends a screenshot of their system, or a customer sends an error message in a language you don’t read. Open the image, press Ctrl 1, select it, press Y. Copy text puts the whole translation on the clipboard for your reply.
OldSnap erases the original text, repairs the background, and draws the translation with the same color, weight and alignment. The font size follows the original and never drops below 85% of it. A longer translation wraps and grows downward instead of shrinking.
You don’t make a file. The selection is read on your computer and only the recognized text goes out. It takes a few seconds, mostly the AI writing the answer. The bar above the selection switches between Original and Translated.
The same selection can be read as plain text with O, explained or questioned in the AI panel on I, or pasted into Excel with Copy as table. I often translate an error dialog, then ask the AI what it means.
Each of these is good at something. This is where they differ.
| Tool | Works in any app | Keeps the layout | Steps needed |
|---|---|---|---|
| OldSnap | Yes. Anything on screen, including images, video frames and borderless games. | Yes. Drawn over the original. Long text wraps downward. | Hotkey, drag, Y. |
| Browser translation extension | Web pages only. Text inside images, canvases and other apps isn’t reached. | Yes, for web text. The page reflows around the new words. | One click on the page. |
| Phone camera translation | Anything you can point a camera at, including another screen. | Roughly. An overlay on the camera image, affected by glare and angle. | Pick up the phone, open the app, aim, hold still. |
| Online image translator | Any image you can save as a file. | Depends on the service. | Screenshot, save, upload, wait, open the result. |
Run the installer. It needs no admin rights. Sign in with an email code or Google, since translation uses the AI.
Ctrl 1 freezes the screen and opens the capture overlay. You can change the shortcut in Settings.
Select the part you want, then press Y or click the translate button on the toolbar. Choose the target language once and it’s remembered.
You pick the target language. The source language is detected for you.
The PP-OCR model built into the app reads the text on your computer: English and other Latin-alphabet languages such as French, German, Spanish and Italian, plus Chinese (simplified and traditional) and Japanese.
It can’t read Korean, Russian, Arabic or Thai text yet, and Vietnamese comes out without its tone marks. So you can translate into Korean or Thai, but not from them.
OldSnap is free, and translation comes out of the monthly AI quota that every account gets: about 20 AI uses a month on the Free plan, more on the paid plans. See pricing
I’m Oldlee, a designer in Guangzhou, and I build OldSnap on my own. Questions go straight to me on Telegram.