Translate Japanese image to English
Photograph or upload anything written in Japanese (station signs, izakaya menus, vending machines, ticket machines, medicine boxes, handwritten shop notices) and read it in English, line by line.
Point at the text
Snap a photo, upload a screenshot, or paste an image (Ctrl/⌘ + V).
Reading Japanese from a photo
Japanese is written in kanji, hiragana and katakana, often written vertically. PointTranslate reads it with a vision model that sees the whole image at once, so it keeps lines and blocks together and translates them in context rather than character by character.
Tips for Japanese photos
- Vertical text reads top to bottom, and columns run right to left. PointTranslate handles that order, but crop to one sign so columns from different signs are not mixed.
- Katakana usually spells foreign loanwords, so a menu line that looks unreadable is often something familiar like ハンバーグ (hamburg steak).
- Handwritten menus in brush script are harder to read than print. Shoot straight on and close enough that each character is sharp.
Translating a restaurant menu? The menu translator explains each dish, not just its name. Got a Japanese PDF or Word file? Use the PDF or document translator.
Questions
How do I translate a Japanese image to English?
Take or upload a photo above. The source is preset to Japanese and the target to your browser's language (English by default). Every block of Japanese text is read, translated and pinned to where it appears on the image.
Can it read Japanese handwriting?
Neat handwriting usually works. Very cursive or stylised writing may come back partly empty, because the model skips text it cannot read reliably instead of guessing.
Does it work on Japanese screenshots?
Yes, and screenshots are the easiest case because the text is perfectly sharp. On a computer you can paste a screenshot straight into the page with Ctrl or Cmd + V.
Other languages: Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Thai, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Hindi.