KemTranslate

KemTranslate is a Windows desktop translation, OCR, and writing assistant built with WPF on .NET 10.

It combines translation, writing assistance, OCR capture, tray integration, and startup options in a single desktop application.

Features

• Text translation with a configurable LibreTranslate-compatible server
• Writing assistance powered by LanguageTool
• Global hotkey support
• Floating translation workflow
• OCR capture with Tesseract
• Dark theme support
• Minimize to tray
• Start minimized to tray
• Start with Windows
• Recent translation and writing history
• Configurable editor font, logging, and OCR settings

Requirements

• Windows
• .NET 10 SDK for local development and builds
• Optional: Tesseract OCR for OCR capture

Project structure

• KemTranslate.csproj - main WPF application
• KemTranslate.Tests/ - lightweight test runner project
• Themes/ - light and dark theme dictionaries
• ocr/ - bundled OCR runtime files copied to output
• docs/ - publishing and repository documentation

Getting started

Visual Studio

1. Open the project in Visual Studio.
2. Set KemTranslate as the startup project.
3. Build and run.

PowerShell

# build the app
dotnet build .\KemTranslate.csproj

# run the app
dotnet run --project .\KemTranslate.csproj

# run the tests
dotnet run --project .\KemTranslate.Tests\KemTranslate.Tests.csproj

Configuration

Settings are stored in kemsettings.json next to the application executable.

The app supports configuration for:

• global hotkey behavior
• dark mode
• minimize-to-tray behavior
• startup behavior
• LibreTranslate server URL and API key
• LanguageTool server URL
• OCR executable path and OCR language
• editor font and size
• logging level

The server URL and API key fields intentionally use example placeholders only. No personal endpoints or API keys are stored in the repository defaults.

OCR setup

If you want to bundle OCR with the app, place the Tesseract runtime files in the ocr/ folder.

See ocr/README.txt for the expected layout.

Build

dotnet build .\KemTranslate.csproj -c Release
dotnet build .\KemTranslate.Tests\KemTranslate.Tests.csproj -c Release

Publish

Example self-contained Windows publish:

dotnet publish .\KemTranslate.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained true -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true -o .\publish\win-x64

Notes:

• files from ocr/ are copied to the output when present
• if you bundle Tesseract, include its required license and notice files
• test the published build before creating a GitHub release

GitHub

For repository setup, pushing, and release publishing, see docs/PUBLISHING.md.

Continuous integration

GitHub Actions is configured in .github/workflows/build.yml to build the app and run the test project on Windows.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.

If you distribute bundled OCR binaries, also review THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.