Crow Translate is an open source translation tool that appeals to the renowned web translators and allows the result to be expressed in five different voices with three different emotions. In addition, you can use the tool to read and translate text in images via OCR. Is Crow Translate the best translation software you can get?
Crow Translate 2.9.1
Price
Free
Language
Dutch
OS
Windows, Linux
Website
https://github.com/crow-translate
8 Score 80 
- Pros
- Compare various translation engines
- Optical Text Recognition
- Five different voices
- Negatives
- Many functions with hotkeys
You get the software GitHub, a platform where programmers post their open source projects. The program comes in different versions and it is even possible to use it in portable mode.
Translate and read aloud
No configuration is required for Crow Translate to work. You can get started right away. On the left you enter the source language and on the right you will read the translation. First of course you have to set an input and an output language. There is a mode that automatically detects the source language, but the translation process is faster if you explicitly set both languages ​​beforehand.
Then select a translation engine at the bottom. By default, this is Google Translate, but you can also select Yandex, Bing, Libre Translate, and Lingva. We also notice how the translation quality differs per engine. For complex translations, Google seems to us the best choice. You can then listen to the translation or copy it via a button.
text recognition
By the way, in the tool bar at the bottom you will see an icon that resembles the well-known cropping tool of image editing software. That’s the ocr button that selects text in images on the screen.
To use the ocr function, you must first download the language models for the language you want to translate the text into. You can find those language models at https://kwikr.nl/crowocr†For example, if you want to translate into English, you have the file eng.traineddata necessary. To translate the recognized text into Dutch, use eng.traineddataâ€
By clicking on the cogwheel, you will reach the settings where you can find the section OCR connects to the downloaded language models. Then, for example, you select a scanned text with the OCR tool, so that it is immediately read and translated.
Conclusion
There is a lot of translation software out there in the meantime, but Crow Translate is definitely one of the more advanced. This is a lightweight program that you can even take with you on a USB stick. It saves you the trouble of surfing to Google Translate or Yandex every time and of course the ocr module is also interesting.
