How to get the Galaxy Note 7 S Pen Translate feature on any Android device (kind of)

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For a piece of plastic, the S Pen sure can do a lot of things. Well, that's a bit of an oversimplification. The S Pen works in tandem with Samsung Galaxy Note phones to pull off some pretty cool things, which, although nothing quite revolutionary, are being more and more coveted by Android users at large. 

The Note “DNA” evolves further with the Galaxy Note 7 and the set of neat additions it brings to the S Pen menu. One of the coolest, in our opinion, is called “Translate” and it lets you translate from and to multiple languages by simply hovering over text with the S Pen – and it works for images too (as long as the text is legible)! That's good and all, but what if you don't have a Note 7, but still want to use this nifty feature? Well, you can do something very similar on pretty much any Android device and all you need is the Google Translate app.


Tap to Translate works in a way similar to the Translate feature found on the Note 7, in that it can be used system-wide. As long as a word or a line of text can be selected, than it can be instantly translated without leaving the current screen. All you have to do is select the text you want to translate, tap the three dots in the pop-up menu, Google Translate will appear in a small window on top of the current screen. From there, you can change between languages, open the main Google Translate app, and access the Settings menu.


There you go – now you can instantly translate text from almost anywhere on your Android device! And if you want something similar to the cool translate-from-image feature on the Note 7, then open the Google Translate app, tap on the small camera icon in the bottom left corner of the text field and either take your own picture or load one from the gallery. You can then run your finger over lines of text to and have your selections instantly translated in the app!

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