It just takes one click in OSINT to land on a website in a foreign language. Investigations don’t have to stop here, if you have the right tools.

In today’s interconnected world, OSINT investigations lead us to foreign language content quite often. This does not mean we have to stop here. Thankfully, a broad variety of tools can support us in translating the content we find.

Before getting into specific tools, I have learned that you will receive the best results if you define the input language manually. Most tools can autodetect the input language, but if you’re working with short sentences or even single words, this might not function reliably. Sometimes translating very long sentences will also produce awkward results, splitting a long sentence into components could help in this case. That said, let’s have a look at some tools I use during my investigations.

First off, I would like to point out DeepL, a German company that trains AI to understand and translate texts. When it comes to translating content in German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian and Polish, DeepL has proven to be more accurate than other tools. You can copy and paste a text or upload a document to have it translated. I let the platform have a try at an excerpt from one of the older Keyfindings’ posts in German.

The next must-have is Google Translate. This extension should be installed in any browser to easily decipher pages on the fly. Next to translating complete webpages, it will show you the original text by hovering the mouse over that passage. In some cases this can be helpful, especially when Google tries to translate names of people, places or companies as well.

What if neither DeepL or the Google Translate extension work? Maybe you’re on a page that does not use the Latin alphabet, e.g. Chinese or Arabic, and some of the content is not ASCII-coded. This happens quite often when looking at Asian websites. Another case might be handwritten information in such languages. One of my favorite tools for this is on the Google Translate website itself. Next to the obvious copying and pasting of text, as well as uploading documents, Google allows you to use a foreign language virtual keyboards to input information.

However, this isn’t always helpful. In Arabic, letters vary in shape depending on their position in the word. This makes it hard for someone not proficient in Arabic to use the keyboard. Luckily, there is a workaround!

The Google Translate page allows you to draw what you see and based on that it will make suggestions and translate them. This works really well with any character-based writing, such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese, as well as with other languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet (Russian, Hindi, etc.). I have added a quick video to demonstrate how it works.

As an alternative, I looked into Windows Ink on the Microsoft Translator, but Microsoft currently doesn’t offer an Arabic handwriting package. However, it does offer Russian, Chinese, Hindi and several others character-based alphabets and languages.

When trying to translate subtitles in Videos, there is a workaround that was shared by Hugo Kamaan on Twitter, showing how you can use your cell phone camera to receive instant translations.

There are definitely more tools out there, so feel free to add anything you use frequently or that you think is missing in the comments.

Я надеюсь, что это было полезно для вашего расследования OSINT!

MW-OSINT / 21.07.2019