Free text recognition and translation Chrome extension for Japanese language learners

Hi everyone! I want to share my free open source project. ScanLingua is a chrome extension that can recognize, translate and annotate kanji from selected area. The app is still raw and buggy, but already usable, so I really want someone to try it :)

Demo video

For about year and a half I have been casually learning Japanese language and in my studies I heavily preferred immersive approach.

But Japanese language (as well as Chinese & partially Korean) have a pretty high bar for casual reading because not only one have to learn two alphabets, but also memorize at least few hundreds kanji.

The regular need switch from reading light text/manga (or watching youtube, dorama etc.) to some dictionary tab just to find this one unknown or forgotten kanji was really ruining the experience.

I discovered some awesome resources like Yomichan (highly recommend checking it out), which recognize text under mouse cursor and provide translation and annotation from given dictionaries.

Unfortunately none of free options used OCR so that one could check any pic be it manga panel or subtitles in paused video right from the same tab. So I decided to make one myself!

ScanLingua provides OCR & translation for more that 100 languages and kanji annotation of selected screen areas. It is great for checking on subtitles, manga panels or any japanese text.

For OCR & translation ScanLingua uses Google vision and translation APIs.

This APIs are not free, but provide 1000 free recognition requests and 500 000 free character translation per month which should suffice for personal use.

One just have to create API key and pay attention for APIs usage to not exceed free monthly limits (key setup instruction provided, it's the hardest part, feel free to contribute instruction improvements).

To help User track key usage simple hotkey counter is set at extension Home tab. 

For Kanji annotation I picked awesome free open source dictionary Jotoba (it also takes data from various resources, such as KanjiDic, Jisho and many other; since Jotoba API is free its availability is not guaranteed).

You can download it here: Chrome store link

Github repo

I plan to work on UI, fix errors and expand existing functionality, hope to add Anki integration.

Feedback is highly appreciated!