Samsung has added real-time camera translation to the S26 series, making it the first Galaxy lineup to support live text translation directly in the viewfinder. Point the camera at a street sign, menu, or product label in a foreign language, tap the “T” button, select Real-time translation, and the text gets replaced on screen in your chosen language, moving naturally as the camera moves.
This builds on Samsung’s existing Overlay Translation system, which is already available on older Galaxy phones including the S22 series. That system is genuinely impressive in its own right: it uses OCR to detect text, translates it, removes the original, reconstructs the background using AI inpainting, and places the translated version back in a matching style. The result looks like the text was always in your language.
The catch with older devices is that this process only works on still images in the Gallery app or Samsung Internet, where the phone has time to fully process and rebuild each frame. Running that same pipeline live at camera speed is currently too demanding, so the S26 makes a practical trade-off: it prioritizes fast text recognition and translation, overlaying results dynamically without the full background reconstruction. The advanced inpainting step is still limited to still images even on the S26.
It is a reasonable compromise. For real-world use cases like navigating a foreign city or reading a menu, speed matters more than pixel-perfect background restoration.
Samsung says this feature is exclusive to the S26 series for now, with broader availability tied to future hardware improvements.
For frequent travelers, this is the kind of quietly useful upgrade that actually changes how you move through unfamiliar places.
Via – Android Authority
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