Forum Discussion
Matthiasar
Jul 07, 2026Steel Contributor
What's the best image translator available on Windows 11?
Been working with a lot of images lately that contain text in foreign languages — product labels, scanned documents, screenshots from foreign websites — and manually typing everything out to translat...
Pal
Jul 07, 2026Brass Contributor
Using Microsoft Paint plus an online translator as an image translator is definitely a creative, free approach. It's not exactly a streamlined "best image translator" experience, but it's totally doable if you want to keep things simple and avoid installing extra software.
Step 1: Get the Text Out of the Image with Paint
- Open your image in Microsoft Paint.
- Use the Selection tool (the dotted rectangle or free-form shape) to draw a box tightly around the text you want to translate. Make sure you get all the words you need.
- Right-click inside the selected area and choose Copy, or just press Ctrl + C on your keyboard.
- Now, open a blank document in Notepad or Word, and paste the text (Ctrl + V). This is important because it's not a direct copy from an image, but a copy from Paint's clipboard selection. At this point, the "text" you've pasted is actually just a copied image snippet. This is the major catch.
Step 2: Translate the Copied "Text" Online
Since Paint doesn't actually recognize the characters as text, you're essentially just moving an image snippet around. To actually translate it,you need a best image translator, you'll need to take that snippet and feed it into an online translator that can read images.
- Go to an image translation service like the web version of Google Translate.
- Both of these services have an "Images" or similar tab that lets you upload a picture file directly. They'll use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to read the text and then translate it for you.