About This Software

About LingoHUD

LingoHUD is a real-time screen, text, and audio translation overlay designed for games and desktop content.

Translate game menus and dialogue, follow multiplayer chat, read manga and comics, or turn game and video audio into translated live subtitles.

From one-shot screen translation and continuously changing text to game chat, manga speech bubbles, and live audio subtitles, LingoHUD includes dedicated profiles for different use cases.

LingoHUD can operate entirely locally without an internet connection or API key. You can also choose a supported online translation option when you want to.

🌟 Key Features

📸 Screen Translation — F6

Capture text visible on the screen, read it with OCR, and display the translation directly over the source text. Use it with game menus, quests, dialogue, websites, applications, and other desktop content.

LingoHUD includes four content profiles:

• General / Full Screen

• Game Chat

• Video / Movie Subtitles

• Manga / Comics

The source language can be detected automatically, or you can select a known language manually.

🔄 Continuous Translation

Use Continuous Translation when you do not want to press a key for every new line.

LingoHUD monitors screen changes. If nothing changes, OCR is not run again; changed text is refreshed, unchanged translations are kept, and text that has disappeared is removed.

Choose:

• Fast — quicker response

• Balanced — recommended default

• Light — lower scan frequency

Screen-change sensitivity can also be adjusted separately.

🌍 Auto / Mixed Multilingual Detection

A screen does not have to contain only one language.

In Auto/Mixed mode, LingoHUD processes text regions independently, so content containing different scripts such as English, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese on the same screen can be routed through different OCR paths.

If you already know the source language, you can select it manually and skip the automatic detection stage.

🎯 Region Selection — F5

You do not have to translate the entire screen.

Draw the area you want to process with the mouse. When a game is in the foreground, the selected region can be saved for that game's executable.

This is especially useful for game-chat boxes and subtitle areas.

💬 In-Game Chat Translation

A dedicated Game Chat profile keeps messages line by line so text from different players is not merged into one sentence.

With Auto/Mixed mode, players can use different languages inside the same chat box. Use F5 to save a game-specific region containing only the chat area.

📖 Manga & Comic Translation

The Manga profile uses a dedicated processing path for detecting speech bubbles and text regions.

Specialized MangaOCR support is included for Japanese manga. On Latin-script manga and comics, LingoHUD can switch to a lighter OCR path.

Translations are rendered according to the detected speech-bubble structure.

Note: Accuracy on colorful or heavily stylized manga/webtoon pages may be lower than on black-and-white manga.

🎙️ Live Audio Subtitles

F8 — System Audio: Detect spoken content from a game, video, or other audio coming from your computer.

F9 — Microphone: Detect speech coming from your microphone.

Speech is transcribed using local Whisper models, translated, and displayed in LingoHUD's subtitle band.

Three speed/accuracy options are available:

• Fast

• Balanced

• More Accurate

For both system audio and microphone input, you can leave the source language on automatic or select a specific language manually. You can also configure original-text display, subtitle position, font size, on-screen duration, speech flow, and noise sensitivity.

Live subtitles may have a small delay because speech recognition waits for a complete phrase or a short pause.

🔊 Outgoing Voice Bridge

The outgoing voice bridge can translate what you say into another language and send it to a game or voice-chat application through a virtual microphone.

The push-to-talk key can be customized, and the feature can also be controlled from the quick-access bubble.

This feature requires a separately installed virtual audio cable such as VB-CABLE or VoiceMeeter. These third-party drivers are not distributed with LingoHUD.

🎬 Video → SRT

LingoHUD is not limited to live use.

The Video → SRT tool in the Tools menu can create subtitle files from video content.

📝 Text & Clipboard Translation

For content that does not require screen OCR:

• F10 — Text Translation Window

• Ctrl+Shift+V — Clipboard Translation

🔍 Smart Box — F12

Smart Box is a compact tool for quickly targeting a specific text or manga region.

In manga mode, it can also be used to target a particular speech bubble around the cursor.

🫧 Floating Quick-Access Bubble

You do not need to keep the main LingoHUD window open all the time.

The draggable bubble provides quick access to:

• Translate Screen

• System Audio

• Microphone

• Outgoing Voice Bridge

• Settings

• Clipboard Translation

The bubble can be disabled completely if you prefer.

🌐 Offline Operation

LingoHUD's core features can run locally:

• Screen OCR

• Multilingual OCR

• MangaOCR

• Translation

• Speech recognition

• Voice activity detection

• Language identification

No API key is required for the default Steam workflow.

If the user explicitly selects online translation, only OCR-recognized text is sent to the online provider. Screenshots and audio are not sent to the online translation provider.

🌎 Language Support

LingoHUD currently supports 108 translation languages.

88 of them can be read through screen OCR.

The application interface is currently available in 11 languages:
Türkçe, English, Deutsch, Français, Español, 日本語, 한국어, 简体中文, Русский, Português do Brasil, العربية.

Language lists are searchable, and frequently used / system-language options are surfaced first.

⚙️ Tune It for Your PC

Every game and every PC behaves differently.

LingoHUD's Simple view includes:

• Game Priority

• Balanced

• Translation Priority

Balanced mode automatically considers available GPU resources and the resources that should be reserved for the game.

On supported systems with an NVIDIA GPU, OCR and speech recognition can use CUDA acceleration and safely fall back to the CPU when needed.

Detailed view also lets you tune scan response, screen-change sensitivity, OCR acceptance threshold, subtitle appearance, speech flow, noise threshold, and other meaningful controls.

🎮 Who Is LingoHUD For?

• Gamers: RPGs, MMOs, strategy games, simulations, and other titles that do not support your preferred language.

• Multiplayer Games: Game chat and voice communication with players from different countries.

• Manga & Comic Readers: Japanese manga, webtoons, and comics in other languages.

• Video & Movie Viewers: Content with missing subtitles or dialogue in another language.

• Desktop Users: Websites, applications, chats, and other on-screen content that needs translation.

⚠️ Important Information

Game Compatibility

Some games may require Borderless Windowed or Windowed mode for the overlay to appear. In some games using exclusive fullscreen, the overlay may not be visible.

OCR & Translation Quality

OCR and translation results can vary depending on language, font, text size, image quality, interface design, and the selected translation engine. Very small or heavily stylized text can be harder to recognize.

Initial Model Loading

Local models may take a few seconds to load the first time they are used. Later operations are usually faster.

Live Audio

Speech-recognition accuracy can vary with audio quality, background noise, accents, and speaking style.

Performance

Resource usage depends on your hardware, screen resolution, game, and enabled features. LingoHUD therefore provides multiple performance and scan-response options.

🚧 Early Access

LingoHUD is under active development.

During Early Access, development will continue especially in OCR accuracy, translation quality, game compatibility, manga/comic processing, live audio subtitles, performance, and usability.

Real-world feedback will help determine which areas receive priority.

💜 Independent Development

LingoHUD is independently developed.

Its goal is not to promise perfection in every game or every type of content, but to provide a flexible tool that makes unsupported-language content more accessible across different use cases.

Your support and feedback directly contribute to the development of LingoHUD.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

LingoHUD's output is strictly limited to language translation and speech-to-text
transcription of content already present on the user's screen or audio. It does not
generate creative, original, or open-ended content.

Content moderation: The translation and recognition models process only user-initiated
input that the user explicitly captures via a hotkey. The software does not produce
novel content; it converts existing content from one language to another, or from
speech and images to text. All processing is deterministic and bounded to the captured
input.