Follow streamers in any language with live captions and translation running directly in your Chrome browser tab.
Twitch connects you to thousands of live channels: a Japanese speedrunner routing a new category, a German developer coding a game engine, a Brazilian artist sketching character designs, a French commentator casting a tournament. Most streamers broadcast in their native language without multilingual subtitles. Twitch's built-in captions exist only for select partner channels and appear exclusively in the language being spoken, leaving international viewers to guess or give up.
Translext listens to the audio in your Twitch browser tab, transcribes what the streamer is saying, and displays captions in the language you choose—from English to Thai to Arabic to dozens more. The extension runs entirely in Chrome; no bots join the chat, no recordings leave your machine. You need Twitch open as a web page, not the desktop application, because Translext captures tab audio and a standalone desktop app produces no browser audio to intercept.
Navigate to twitch.tv in a Chrome browser tab and find the channel you want to watch. The desktop Twitch app won't work—Translext hooks into Chrome's tab audio API, which only sees sound playing inside browser tabs. Once the stream loads and audio begins, click the Translext icon in your extensions toolbar and choose your target language. The extension starts listening immediately. Twitch's player interface remains unchanged; you're still watching the same stream at the same quality. Translext adds a caption overlay that floats above the video, and you can drag it to any corner or edge that doesn't block the streamer's camera, gameplay overlay, or chat replay if you keep that panel open.
Twitch streams are genuinely live, often with only a few seconds of broadcast delay. Translext transcribes and translates as speech arrives, so captions trail the audio by two to four seconds depending on how quickly the streamer talks and how complex the sentences are. That lag is noticeable during rapid-fire commentary—esports casters calling team fights, auctioneers running drop events, or drummers talking between songs. The extension will catch up during pauses. Speech recognition and translation both make mistakes, especially with game jargon, emote names, inside jokes, or when the streamer's microphone picks up alerts, music, or multiple people talking at once. You'll see errors; treat the captions as assistance, not gospel.
Translext translates only the audio in the tab—it does not read or translate Twitch chat messages, on-screen alerts, donation text-to-speech, or anything else rendered as text or visual elements. If a viewer's TTS message plays through the stream audio, Translext will transcribe that spoken voice. After a stream ends, many creators save the broadcast as a VOD. You can run Translext on those recorded videos the same way, seeking forward and backward as needed; captions resume when playback resumes. Clips work identically: open a clip link in Chrome, play it, and the extension transcribes the excerpt. If you watch a Twitch VOD with the chat replay sidebar visible, captions and chat scroll independently.
Yes. When a streamer hosts or raids, Twitch redirects the video player to the new channel and that channel's audio starts playing in the same tab. Translext continues listening to whatever audio the tab produces, so captions switch to the new streamer's voice without you needing to restart the extension. The language setting you chose stays active unless you manually change it.
Translext transcribes anything it hears as if it were speech, so loud music or game sound effects can produce gibberish captions. The extension can't separate the streamer's voice from background noise. If a streamer is talking over gameplay, transcription quality depends on how clearly their microphone isolates their voice. Streams with very loud music, echo, or multiple people shouting will confuse the recognition engine and generate incomplete or nonsensical text.
Theater mode works fine; the caption overlay remains visible above the video. Fullscreen is trickier: Chrome extensions typically can't draw overlays on top of true fullscreen video. If you enter fullscreen, captions may disappear or the browser may exit fullscreen automatically depending on how Chrome handles the extension's display layer. Theater mode gives you a large picture without that limitation, so it's the safer choice if you want translated captions and an immersive view.
Translext runs transcription and translation locally in the browser tab using your computer's processor. On older or low-powered machines, you may notice higher CPU usage, but the stream itself continues to buffer and play at whatever quality Twitch delivers based on your network connection. The extension does not interfere with Twitch's video servers or change your bandwidth consumption. If your computer is already struggling to play a 1080p60 stream smoothly, adding live transcription might make things worse.
Yes, as long as audio is playing in the tab. Just-chatting streams, cooking streams, IRL walking streams, and podcasts all work. The extension doesn't care what video category the stream is filed under; it listens to the tab audio. If the streamer's microphone quality drops because they're outdoors or moving away from the mic, transcription accuracy suffers. Wind noise, street traffic, and background conversations will create transcription errors or gaps in the captions.
Live captions and translated audio for anything playing in your browser tab. No bots to invite, nothing to upload.