The Multilingual Challenge
English-language OCR has been largely solved. The challenge lies in scripts that are structurally different from the Latin alphabet: right-to-left Arabic, character-based Chinese and Japanese, complex Devanagari conjuncts, and mixed-script documents that combine two or more languages on a single page.
Language Coverage
TextLens uses EasyOCR, which natively supports 80+ languages including:
Latin-script languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Romanian, Czech, and many more.
CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean): Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese (including kanji + hiragana + katakana), Korean (Hangul).
Right-to-left scripts: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian (Farsi), Urdu.
South and Southeast Asian: Hindi (Devanagari), Thai, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Sinhala, Khmer, Burmese.
Cyrillic: Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and others.
Tips for Right-to-Left Languages
Arabic and Hebrew text flows right-to-left, which can confuse OCR post-processing that assumes left-to-right ordering. When extracting Arabic text:
1. Verify the output reads naturally from right to left 2. Check that numbers (which appear left-to-right even in Arabic text) are correctly positioned 3. Test with a variety of fonts — Arabic has significant font variation
Mixed-Language Documents
Some documents contain multiple languages — a French contract with English technical terms, or a Chinese document with English product names. EasyOCR handles these by detecting language per text region. For best results:
- Ensure text regions are visually separated
- Higher resolution helps the engine distinguish character sets
- For critical documents, review extracted text carefully
Character Variants
Some scripts have regional character variants that affect OCR accuracy. Traditional vs. Simplified Chinese is the most common example. TextLens defaults to detecting both but you can optimise for a specific variant by selecting the appropriate language in the language selector.
Testing Your Language
The easiest way to verify multilingual OCR quality is to upload a known document and compare the output to the original. TextLens shows a confidence score — if it's below 80% for your language, try improving image quality first before concluding the language isn't supported.