In Android, when selecting text, there’s a small pop-up menu that sometimes offer the option to translate the selection. It’s pretty convenient but almost never showed up on my phone. It seems that the reason was that Japanese was one of my system languages (multiple languages are allowed with an order of preference).
Removing Japanese from my system languages allowed the “translate” option to be shown when selecting Japanese text, which is pretty convenient.
BUT
Because Japanese is not one of my system language anymore, kanjis in input fields are now displayed as Chinese characters (Chinese and Japanese kanjis share the same character codes and the operating system/app decides whether to show the Chinese character or the different Japanese character. Example: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%9B%B4#Han_character).
Android seems to decide whether kanjis should be shown as Chinese or Japanese characters based on whether Japanese is one of the system languages (makes sense, many more users are Chinese) (I guess that in many cases it can use other data, like if some website or app provides metadata saying the text is in Japanese I guess it will be shown properly).
Hence my question: is there a way of having both proper display of Japanese characters and support for the translate option for Japanese text in the pop-up menu on Android?
(sorry, there’s probably some bad terminology in this post, feel free to correct me)
Edit: best alternative I know of is to use the “share” option of the pop-up menu and share with a translation app, but that’s a few more clicks + one scroll + looking for where the translate app icon went in the large menu, instead of one click.
Edit2: phone is up-to-date Pixel 6 Pro
Edit3: Google Translate has a feature to translate copied text automatically. After copying the text, the translation can be shown by clicking on the google translate notification in the notification bar. So a bit faster than sharing if not too many pending notifications but need to keep a Google Translate notification present.
2 comments
this sounds less of an Android problem and more of whatever weird vendor modified Android you got. since you mentioned what model/manufacturer i can only guess.
fwiw, this has always worked for me on older Samsung androids and iphone SE
Long press the text to highlight what you want to translate then hit the three dots. Translate is on the next “page” of options. It will be after the cut, copy share options. It used to be on the first “page” of options a few updates ago.