How Proxylang Translates the Text Inside Your Images

Translate a webpage and one stubborn layer stays in the original language: the text baked into images. Hero banners, menu boards, product diagrams, infographics, UI screenshots — to a translation system that only reads HTML, they’re invisible. Visitors notice immediately.

This is especially painful on design-heavy storefronts. Sites built on platforms like IMWEB, Cafe24, Squarespace, and Shopify often carry their most persuasive copy — promotions, size charts, feature callouts — inside images. Translate the page around them and the result looks half-finished.

So we built image translation into Proxylang. Here’s how it works, and the decisions that make it feel effortless.

One attribute — or no code at all

If you can edit your markup, mark any image with a single attribute:

<img src="/banners/summer-sale.png" data-pl-translate-image />

That’s the whole integration. Detection runs on every page render.

But many site owners can’t edit an <img> tag — no-code platforms don’t let you. So the Proxylang dashboard also accepts plain image addresses: copy an image’s URL from your live site, paste it in, done. The widget recognizes those images on the page and runs them through the same pipeline. No developer needed.

The image is rebuilt, not captioned

When Proxylang encounters a marked image in a new language, it detects the text, translates it in context, and rebuilds the image — fonts, colors, textures, and effects preserved, with the original dimensions kept so your layout never reflows. Decorative typography, text layered behind subjects, dense UI screenshots: the goal is an image that looks like the designer made it in that language.

The first translation of an image takes about 45 seconds to a minute, and it swaps into the page automatically once ready — no refresh. Every visit after that is instant.

Translate once, serve forever

Each image is translated once per language, then cached permanently. A thousand Korean visitors viewing your banner cost exactly one translation. Visitors browsing in your site’s original language never trigger anything at all.

We’re careful about what counts as “the same image,” too. CDN resize parameters, cache-busting query strings, and staging-versus-production URLs all collapse into one identity — so the same logical image never gets translated (or billed) twice by accident. And if an image contains no text at all, it’s skipped, not charged.

When you do update a banner, the new file is picked up as a new image, and there’s a per-image Retranslate button in the dashboard whenever you want a fresh pass.

Translated images that search engines can see

Image translation works in every Proxylang integration mode. On hybrid and proxy setups, translated images are served to search engine crawlers as part of the translated page — so your localized visuals are part of your international SEO story, not just a client-side trick.

Simple, prepaid pricing

Image translation is available on all paid plans as prepaid packs — from $0.35 per image, where one credit covers one image in one target language. Packs stay valid for twelve months, and cached translations keep serving forever at no extra cost.

It supports 30+ languages — including right-to-left scripts like Arabic and Hebrew — and the common web formats (PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF).

If your best copy lives inside your images, it deserves to be multilingual too. Details and live before/after examples: proxylang.dev/image-translation.