How can I translate text from an image on my pc?

Here's the gist of how it works and how to translate text from image using PowerToys. You're really using two powers combined: its built-in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to grab the text, and its AI smarts to translate it.

1. Copy the Image: First, you just need to get that image into your clipboard. Take a screenshot with Win + Shift + S, or right-click and copy an image from a webpage or document.

2. Open Advanced Paste: Hit the magic shortcut: Win + Shift + V . This opens up the Advanced Paste window.

3. Extract the Text: In that window, you'll see an option for "Image to Text" (or "Paste image to text"). This uses local OCR to scan the image on your clipboard and pull all the words out of it . It's surprisingly accurate for a lot of clean images.

4. Translate with AI: Now, here's where the translation happens. Instead of just pasting the plain text, you can use the AI-powered paste feature. You can type in a prompt like "Translate this text to Spanish" or "Translate to French and save as a .txt file" . The AI will take the text it just extracted from the image and translate it for you on the fly.

So, that’s really how to translate text from image with PowerToys in a nutshell. It takes a tiny bit of setup, but once you’ve got the AI key in place, it feels like a superpower—copy image, paste, prompt, and you’re reading translated text in seconds. Not bad for a free Microsoft tool, right?