Hello! Thank you for sharing your PingXie fic recs! Since you post a lot of fics on Weibo, I don't know if you're a Chinese speaker, but if you're not, I was wondering how you read Weibo fics since a lot of them are in image format, and sometimes the Google Translate app doesn't work very well for them. I'd really love to read them, so if you have any tips on apps or translators to use I'd be grateful!
Hi! It's my pleasure to share! ( ◜‿◝ )♡
I'm not a Chinese speaker, I use machine translator. Since I always use my phone to read them, I'm not sure how it works on computer.
I assume that what you mean is the super long images, because normal images work fine on Google Translate. For long images, the Chinese characters are so tiny that they can't be detected properly and thus failed to translate. To solve this problem, I need to either crop the images using a photo/image editor or screenshot them. I usually do the latter, so I don't have to go back and forth editing them. For flipped/mirrored images I still have to use a photo/image editor though. For scribbled images, I have to resign to my fate and hope that the app would recognize them >.<
Other than Google Translate, I'm also using 2 translation apps in which all of them can also translate text from images; Microsoft Translator and DeepL. The former, I use it for comparison and the latter, the quality is pretty good but it has limited usage. If you don't mind spending more money then you can consider it.
I usually don't directly use Google Translate app though, I use Google Lens in my file manager. It's more convenient for me, here is what I usually do:
1. Download the image (it's optional, but I decided to download it just in case that it's suddenly gone) → go to File Manager and find the image → zoom it → screenshot it (one image needs many screenshots, I did it in one go to avoid getting the same image)
It's a gif, Tumblr didn't let me post more than 1 video :(
2. Find the screenshot image → scan it with Google Lens (make sure that every sentence is in white line which means it's detected by the app)
If the result is too tiny, you can choose to open it on Google Translate app.
It's a bit tricky, but I haven't found another way.
Hope this helps!
Thanks for asking! (｡･ω･｡)ﾉ♡
