The Galaxy S26 series can translate the world around you in real time

Samsung has quietly given the Galaxy S26 series a clever new capability that no previous Galaxy phone has had or will get. The company has introduced Real-time translation inside the Galaxy S26’s camera app. While Samsung has been rolling out its Overlay Translation system to older Galaxy devices, the S26 is the first lineup capable of Real-time translations using the tech, directly in the viewfinder.

So now, instead of showing translated text in floating boxes, the Galaxy S26 series replaces foreign-language text in real time, keeping it anchored to its original position as you move the camera. Street signs, menus, labels, and instructions appear rewritten in your chosen language, and they move naturally with the scene in front of you.

How it works

The real-time feature builds on Samsung’s Overlay Translation system, which is also supported on older Galaxy phones, including the S22 series, for still images and web content.

Overlay Translation doesn’t just translate the text, it reconstructs the image itself. The phone detects text using OCR, translates it with Samsung’s neural machine translation engine, removes the original text, restores the background of the image using “AI in-painting,” and then places the translated text back into the image in a matching style and location.

On older Galaxy devices, this process works in the Gallery app and Samsung Internet, where the phone has enough time to fully rebuild the image. The Galaxy S26 takes this a step further by applying the same core idea in real time through the camera.

That said, real-time camera translation on the Galaxy S26 comes with some performance limits. Advanced in-painting, the step that perfectly reconstructs backgrounds, is currently too heavy to run live in the camera viewfinder and is limited to still image translations in the Gallery app or the browser.

On the Galaxy S26 series, Samsung focuses on fast text recognition and translation, then overlays the translated text dynamically as the camera moves. To use Real-time translation on the Galaxy S26 series, users need to follow these steps:

• Point the camera at the text or image that needs to be translated
• Tap the “T” button > Real-time translation
• After a while, the translated text moves with the camera view

The translated text stays locked to the scene, creating the impression that what you’re seeing is already in your language.

Samsung says this capability is exclusive to the Galaxy S26 series for now, with plans to bring it to future models as processing power improves.