How to translate the subtitles on your screen in real time

You found the perfect video: a cooking show from Seoul, a travel vlog from Seville, a documentary that only exists with Portuguese subtitles. The subtitles are right there on screen. You just can’t read them.

Live Translate in Caption Flow solves this without leaving the app you’re watching in. It reads the text in an area of the screen you choose, translates it, and shows the translation just underneath the original, updating as the subtitles change.

How it works

Live Translate doesn’t listen to the audio. It looks at the part of the screen you select, reads the text there on your phone, and translates it. That makes it a good fit for anything that already has subtitles or on-screen text: shows and films, YouTube clips with burned-in captions, games with dialogue boxes, social videos with text overlays, even a menu in a photo.

If the video has no subtitles at all, use Live Caption instead, which captions the audio and can translate it.

Set it up

1. Install Caption Flow and open Live Translate from the home screen.
2. Choose the source language (the subtitles you see) and the target language (the one you read).
3. Choose how to translate. Offline translation is free and runs on your phone; download the language pack once. Google Translate gives better quality and needs a connection.
4. Tap Start. Android asks for permission to capture the screen; Caption Flow only reads the area you select.
5. Open your video app and draw a box around the subtitle area. The translation appears right below it.

To move the box later, long-press the overlay, or use Change area in the notification. Turn on Keep selected area visible if you want a subtle outline around the area while you watch.

Translate the whole screen at once

Sometimes you don’t need a running translation, just a quick look: a settings page in another language, a comment thread, a sign in a game. Turn on the floating shortcut, open the app you want, and tap Translate screen on the bubble. Caption Flow translates everything on screen, right over the original text. Tap Done to go back. It uses the same languages you picked for Live Translate.

Nothing is captured until you tap, and screen translate turns itself off after ten minutes without use.

Getting clean results

• Keep the box tight. Select just the subtitle line, not the whole picture, so moving scenery and logos aren’t read as text.
• Pick the right script. Live Translate reads Latin-alphabet languages plus Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Devanagari. Set the source language to match what’s on screen.
• Use Google Translate for nuance. Offline translation is great for getting the gist; online translation handles idioms and longer sentences better.
• Leave the subtitles on in the video app. Live Translate needs text on screen to read.

When the screen comes out blank

Some streaming apps protect their picture, so any screen capture, including Caption Flow’s, comes out black and there’s nothing to read. For those apps there’s another way: download a subtitle file for the episode in the language you want and play it with Subtitle Overlay, which shows an SRT file in a box over any app. You can nudge the timing until it lines up with the video.

What gets sent where

Text is extracted on your phone. With offline translation, that text never leaves the device. With Google Translate, only the extracted text is sent to Google to be translated; it isn’t stored on our servers or shared with anyone else. Read more in the privacy policy.