Live on-screen translation.
The whole screen. Automatically.
AFKLiveTranslate 2 detects on-screen text by itself, reads it locally, and paints a clean translated overlay in place, live, up to 20 times per second. It taps your GPU (about 5%) to grab the screen and speed up reading, then works on the CPU (about 15%) and in memory, light enough to leave your game's performance untouched.
Note: the overlay is not captured by standard screen recorders. Demos are filmed with a phone.
Average CPU
Real-time translation that leaves your processor room to breathe.
GPU load
It uses the GPU to grab the screen and accelerate reading, so your game keeps its power.
Live updates
Up to 20 translation passes per second, per screen.
From “draw a region” to a live translation layer
Version 1 translated a region you drew, on demand. Version 2 watches the screen for you and keeps the translation live.
Version 1: region OCR
- ×You draw a region, then translate on demand
- ×One capture at a time
- ×Single-region focus
- ×Manual re-trigger when text changes
Version 2: live auto-detect
- ✓Automatic text detection plus optional multi-region drawing when you need it
- ✓Continuous live overlay, up to 20 Hz per screen
- ✓Multi-monitor auto-detected, pick your screen
- ✓Featherlight ~15% CPU, ~5% GPU, real-time, no cloud OCR
Key features
Automatic detection
Finds the text zones on screen by itself and keeps up as they change. Need precision? Draw one or several regions yourself for the cases that call for it.
Featherlight engine
It taps your GPU to capture the screen and speed up reading, then translates on the CPU and in memory: GPU load stays around 5%, CPU around 15%. No Tesseract, no cloud, every frame kept.
Clean overlay
The translated text sits in place while the background stays visible, so you never lose context.
Safe reader
A validation stage blocks unreadable or garbage text, so the overlay only shows what's actually reliable.
How it works
One full pipeline runs per screen, from capture to overlay.
Capture
The selected screen is captured live.
Detect
Text zones are located automatically.
Read
Text is read locally, straight from the image.
Validate
The safe stage blocks junk before translation.
Overlay
A clean translation is painted in place.
Always current
22 languages
A curated base set ships in the app, ready offline after first run, see the full list.
Weekly language & glyph packs
Signed packs update automatically in the background, language and glyphs together.
Regular optimization updates
The app checks for and applies signed program updates from a button in the menu.
See it live
The base languages are ready right away, extra packs download once per language from our own server and may take a few minutes depending on your connection.
Once it's running, right-click the AFKLiveTranslate 2 icon to open the settings and pick your screen.
Point it at text that stays on screen for a second or more: game menus and dialogue, visual novels, documents, web pages, or subtitles burned into the video image. Auto-generated rolling captions, like YouTube's, redraw word by word and are the hardest case. They are actively being worked on.
Because the overlay isn't screen-capturable, video demos are filmed with a phone.
Supported languages
22 languages. Each one can be read from your screen, and each one can be the language you read in, 462 language pairs in all. You pick the two; the app handles the rest.
The base set ships with the app and works offline after the first run. Any other pack downloads once, automatically, from our own server the first time you select it; every pack is signed and checked before use. Latin, Cyrillic, Japanese and Chinese scripts are read directly from the image, no OCR engine to install.
What to expect today, language by language
Measured on real web pages and on our language test set: share of words read exactly right from the screen. Honest figures, they improve with each update.
Reading · very good (about 90 to 96%)
Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Indonesian, Polish, Romanian, English, French.
Reading · good (about 83 to 90%)
German, Czech, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian.
Reading · Japanese and Chinese
Horizontal text on web pages and in games is read well (95 to 97% of words in our page tests). Very small or stylized text is still less reliable. Vertical Japanese text in manga is supported.
Translation · best: into English or French
From 21 languages, common word groups and expressions are translated as a whole. Still fairly literal on long, complex sentences.
Translation · into Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German
Word groups from the main European languages, word by word for the others. Good for getting the gist.
Translation · into other languages, Japanese and Chinese included
Mostly word by word: understandable, but literal. Treat it as an early version.
Garbage is stopped before translation: when the text on screen cannot be read reliably, nothing is shown rather than a wrong translation.
Current release: version 1.0.6, October 2026. See what changed in each version.
Questions
How do I open the settings and controls?
Right-click the AFKLiveTranslate 2 icon (the small floating button) to open the menu, pick the screen to translate, choose your languages, and reach every setting from there.
Does it work offline?
The translation itself does, entirely. Capture, recognition and translation run on your PC, and the included base languages work offline after first run. An internet connection is needed once, to start the trial and to activate your licence. The network is otherwise used only to check your licence and to download language packs from our own server: the extra languages and language pairs you pick (once each) and pack updates. Nothing you read or translate is ever sent.
Do I need a powerful PC or a GPU?
No. The app adapts to your PC: on first start it checks your memory, processor cores and graphics card, then picks a speed on its own. Light (10 scans per second) for 8 GB PCs and integrated graphics, Balanced (15 per second) from 16 GB with a 6 GB graphics card, Fast (20 per second) from 32 GB with a 10 GB graphics card. Memory used on average: about 3 GB in Light, 3.5 GB in Balanced, 4.5 GB in Fast. It also starts fewer reading processes when free memory is low, and you can change the mode at any time in the menu. It uses your GPU to capture the screen and accelerate reading, while translation runs on the CPU (typically around 15%) and in memory, and it won't steal frames from your game. Windows 10/11 64-bit.
Does it handle multiple monitors?
Yes. Screens are detected automatically, you pick which one to translate when you start.
Why isn't the overlay visible in a screen recording?
The overlay is rendered in a way that typical capture software doesn't record. For demos, film the screen with a phone.
Translation is still fairly literal on complex sentences
Improving it is the top priority of the next releases.