How Google could end up translating images in Chrome

Circle to Search is already very useful on our phones and Google has been working hard to expand the places we can access it, and recently brought early support to Chrome beta versions Via Lens. But what exactly will it look like in our browser? Will it be as feature-rich as we’ve come to expect from Android? It seems increasingly likely that it will be, with new tests showing the tool’s translation capabilities.

Get up Circle to search On your phone right now, you’ll see a Google Translate icon in the corner, ready to analyze what’s on your screen. This is especially useful when we’re not talking about text-based translation, but instead want to work with an image.

There in X, leopeva64 has been documenting Google’s progress on implementing this whole Lens thing in Chrome. A week ago, they shared that Google might add a Translate button to the Chrome Lens WIP interface, in a way that would work very similarly to how it does with Circle to Search on Android. At the time, this sounded like it wasn’t particularly well-supported by evidence, and might end up not happening. Well, we can’t say yet what features Google might actually include, but Leopeva64 has managed to get that Translate button to appear in Chrome:

At the moment, it doesn’t do anything, and in fact, you can’t translate anything in the browser window this way. But once Google plugs in the rest of the necessary logic, it’s possible that this interface will be the one we see when we ask Chrome to use Lens to do its magic.

Chrome already has Translator built in, of course, but it’s limited to text. If this addition eventually comes to fruition, those powerful image translation tools could become just as easy to use on the desktop as they are on our phones.