The fastest answer is to hand the picture to a tool that detects language automatically — Google Lens or an image translator will simply tell you. But if you want to work it out yourself, or check that the tool got it right, it takes two steps: identify the writing system, then look for a few letters that only one language uses.
Step one: identify the script
There are far more languages than scripts. Deciding whether you are looking at Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese characters or something else already narrows it to a handful of candidates.
Chinese, Japanese or Korean?
- Korean: square syllable blocks full of circles (ㅇ) and short straight strokes, as in 한국어. Circles plus lines is almost always Korean.
- Japanese: Chinese characters mixed with curvy hiragana (の, は, を) or angular katakana (カ, ト, ン). If there is any kana at all, it is Japanese.
- Chinese: characters only, with no kana and no hangul. Common words tell simplified from traditional: 们, 这, 语 are simplified; 們, 這, 語 are traditional.
The classic mistake is calling an all-kanji Japanese headline Chinese. Read a few more lines — Japanese body text almost always contains kana like の or を.
Right to left: Arabic, Persian, Urdu or Hebrew?
- Hebrew: square, unconnected letters, as in עברית.
- Arabic script is cursive and connected, and several languages share it, so look for letters the others lack:
- Persian: پ چ ژ گ, which Arabic does not use.
- Urdu: ٹ ڈ ڑ, and ے at the end of words.
- None of those letters present usually means Arabic.
Cyrillic: Russian, Ukrainian or something else?
If it looks like English letters that have been flipped and rearranged, it is Cyrillic. Russian is the most common. If you see і, ї, є or ґ, it is Ukrainian — Russian does not use those letters.
Letters hanging from a line: Hindi and its neighbours
Letters joined along the top by a continuous horizontal line, like washing on a clothesline, are Devanagari — the script of Hindi, Marathi and Nepali, and in pictures it is most often Hindi. Bengali and Punjabi's Gurmukhi script also hang from a top line but have different letterforms, so if the shapes do not match Hindi, those are the next candidates.
Small loops and no spaces: Thai
Many letters with small loops, no spaces between words, and vowel and tone marks stacked above and below the line, as in ภาษาไทย. That is what Thai looks like.
Latin alphabet: tell European languages apart by their special letters
- Spanish: ñ, and the upside-down ¿ and ¡.
- Portuguese: ã and õ (vowels with a tilde), and ç.
- French: é, è, ê, à, ç, and œ.
- German: ä, ö, ü, and ß.
- Turkish: a dotless ı, plus ğ and ş.
- Polish: ł, ą, ę, ż.
- Vietnamese: tone marks on almost every word, plus ơ, ư and đ.
You do not need to speak a language to recognise it. Identify the script, find one or two telltale letters, and ten seconds is usually enough.
Once you know: translate the image itself
PicTranslate detects the source language in your image automatically, so you only choose the language you want. It translates the text and redraws it in place, keeping the layout and background. If a result looks off, check the script against the guide above first — images that mix two languages are where automatic detection is least reliable.
