The short answer: you don’t need to copy text to translate it. A screen translator reads text directly off your display and shows the translation on top — which means games, images, chat bubbles, and “uncopyable” text all translate the same way. On Android, install Swift Translate (free), turn it on, and drag the floating bubble over anything you can’t read.
Google Translate’s tap-to-translate is the tool most people try first — and it still needs you to copy the text. The text you most want translated (game dialogue, embedded captions, stubborn apps) is exactly the text you can’t copy. That’s the gap screen translation closes.
The three moves
1. Drag — for a sentence or a message
Slide the bubble across the text. The translation replaces it visually, right in place. This is the move you’ll use 95% of the time: a chat message, a caption, a paragraph in a foreign article.
2. Area scan — for a specific region
Long-press the bubble and highlight a region — one dialogue box, one card, one error message. Only that region gets translated. Precise and tidy.
3. Translate all — for the whole screen
One tap translates every visible line at once. Made for restaurant menus, settings pages, and full web pages.
What people translate with it (real data)
From our own anonymized stats, the top surfaces are WhatsApp (3.7M translations/month), TikTok comments (1.4M), Telegram, Instagram, browsers — and a very long tail of games, manga readers, and AI chat apps. Once translation is one drag away, people translate everything.
Special cases worth knowing
- Subtitles: draw a box over the caption area once — Netflix, YouTube, or any player — and subtitles translate live as they change (Android 11+).
- Photos and screenshots: the camera/photo mode OCRs a menu or sign in about a second.
- Games: text in games usually can’t be selected at all, which is why the game translation crowd loves screen translators. Players of Japanese otome games are some of our happiest reviewers.
- Offline: download language packs and the drag translation works with no connection.
Why not just screenshot into Google Lens?
You can — but that is five steps instead of one: screenshot, open Lens, wait, read, switch back. In a real conversation with many messages, a one-gesture tool is much faster.
Related: The screen translator, in full · Best screen translator apps compared honestly
