Google is working on a new way for Chrome to translate text in images
Google Chrome is one of themost popular web browsersaround, and it deserves the recognition. Yes, it is infamously resource-intensive for older computers, but its ease of use, effortlessplatform-agnostic sync, and widespread availability are arguably unrivaled. One of the elements that help make the experience so intuitive is a fast and accurate website translation engine, and this could soon make it even easier to translate text within images.
Chrome already allowstranslation of entire web pagesby simply right-clicking (on desktop) or tapping the menu button (on mobile), then selecting the “Translate” option. However, this doesn’t work directly for posters, banners, and other embedded images in web pages. That’s why we were excited when Chrome feature researcher Leopeva64 shared a link to work-in-progressChromium source codethat would add a new option to Chrome’s translation functionality.
The new image translation tool isn’t live yet, not even in Chrome Beta or Canary. When the code is eventually added, you’ll initially have to activate it with afeature flag, at least while development is still ongoing. As a final caveat, once enabled, the option will only appear in Chrome’s context menu after the browser has translated the rest of the text on the page.
It all sounds pretty promising, making full-service translation a lot easier. Just translate a page, then right-click any images that contain text from a foreign language and choose “Image translate.” This will call onGoogle Lensto process the text, though the Chromium commit notes that third-party translation services will also be supported.
Until Google adds this feature to a production version of Chrome, you can always translate images with Lens — it just takes a few more steps. First, right-click or long-press the image, then select “Search image with Google Lens” from the context menu. After that, switch over to the “Translate” tab, and then you’ll be able to highlight text and choose a target language.
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