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Jabrail Khalilov
Jabrail Khalilov

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I spent two days rebuilding my open-source Windows screen translator — Click'n'Translate 1.5

#python #opensource #programming #productivity

I built Click'n'Translate because I wanted translation to feel like a native Windows shortcut, not a separate workflow.

Select text or draw a rectangle around anything on the screen, press a hotkey, and get OCR, translation, or a clean clipboard copy without leaving the app or game you are using.

Click'n'Translate screen OCR and translation

What makes it useful

  • Translate selected text with a global hotkey
  • Capture any screen region and translate it instantly
  • Extract text directly to the clipboard
  • Choose between Windows OCR, Tesseract, EasyOCR, and RapidOCR
  • Use Google and several alternative online translators
  • Install Argos packages for private offline translation
  • Translate documents and keep optional history
  • Use an installer or a portable ZIP
  • Switch the interface between English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, German, and French

Click'n'Translate demo

Why version 1.5 took two days

A user asked why Argos was not installing correctly. I thought it would be a quick evening fix.

It turned into two full days of rebuilding the updater, cleaning up every dialog, fixing window placement, improving OCR and translation package management, preserving selected languages, correcting localization, and testing engine switching and installation paths.

The result is the version I originally wanted to ship. I am genuinely proud of it, and I think it has become one of the strongest free screen-translation tools in its segment.

Verification instead of guesswork

For this release I ran:

  • 215 automated tests plus 8 additional subtests
  • Windows App Certification Kit checks
  • Real update-path testing
  • Argos offline translation checks
  • RapidOCR and OCR-package checks
  • Installer and portable-build smoke tests

One important note: users of versions older than 1.5 should install 1.5 manually once. That establishes the new update baseline for future releases.

Try it

GitHub: https://github.com/jabrailkhalil/clickntranslate

Latest release: https://github.com/jabrailkhalil/clickntranslate/releases/tag/v1.5.0

It is free, open source, and built for Windows 10/11 x64.

I would love honest feedback: which apps, games, languages, and OCR engines should I test next? Bug reports and contributions are very welcome.

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