How to Translate Text in a Video

Updated October 16, 2026 · By A17Lab

Camera translation apps handle the world in front of you. But what about text inside a video — a cooking tutorial with Korean captions, a Japanese product demo, street signs in your own travel footage, a viral clip with Spanish overlays? To translate text in a video, you need two steps chained together: detect the text (OCR), then translate it. Extract Text From Video does both in one flow.

The two-step problem, solved in one app

1. Import the video into Extract Text From Video — MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, up to about 15 minutes.
2. Detection runs on-device. The AI OCR reads all on-screen text across the whole video. Your video is never uploaded.
3. Translate into your language. Pick one of 15 target languages and the detected text is translated next to the original, line by line. Translation uses Apple's on-device translation; the first time you use a language, iOS may download it.
4. Copy or export the translated text into notes, messages, or a TXT or SRT file.

What people translate from videos

• Foreign-language tutorials: recipes, DIY, and beauty content where the instructions are overlay text (TikTok workflow).
• Travel footage: the menu, sign, or notice you filmed but couldn't read at the time.
• Burned-in subtitles in a language you don't speak — extract, then translate (subtitle extraction guide).
• Business content: competitor demos and product videos in other markets.
• Study material: lectures and slides published in another language.

Why not screenshot into a translator app?

It works for a single frozen frame, once. For text spread across a video, you'd screenshot each moment, feed them one by one into a translator, and lose the on-video context. One scan of the whole clip, translated line by line, replaces that entire loop. And unlike upload-based tools, the detection step never sends your footage anywhere.