ThreebrookInterpret

HELP

Using Threebrook Interpret

Shortcuts, screenshots, translation engines and where your data is kept.

Shortcuts

ShortcutWhat it does
Alt+QType to translate
Alt+DTranslate selected text (select it first)
Alt+SCapture: after drawing a box, recognize text, translate, pin, copy or save
Alt+WTranslate a screenshot: draw a box and it’s recognized and translated
Alt+HClipboard history (text and images); Enter pastes

Change them in Settings › Shortcuts: click a box and press the new combination. Press Backspace to clear one so that feature uses no shortcut.

Capture and annotate

  • The window under the mouse lights up. Click to take that window (click the desktop for the whole screen), or drag to draw a box.
  • Drag the edges and corners to resize. Arrow keys nudge the box; Shift + arrow keys resize it.
  • While capturing: Enter or Ctrl+C copies, Ctrl+S saves, F3 pins, O recognizes text, T translates, right-click or Esc cancels.
  • Annotation tools are on the left of the toolbar, on keys 1–8: rectangle, ellipse, arrow, pen, highlighter, text, mosaic, numbered steps. Pick one and the size and colors appear below.
  • Hold Shift for squares and circles. Click to place text; Esc or Ctrl+Enter finishes it. Ctrl+Z undoes, Ctrl+Y redoes.
  • Copying, saving and pinning include annotations; text recognition still uses the original image.

Pinned captures

Drag to move, scroll to zoom, Ctrl + scroll for transparency, double-click or Esc to close, right-click for more.

Long screenshot

After drawing a box, press L or click Long screenshot on the toolbar, then scroll down as it stitches, or click “Auto scroll” and it stops at the end. Then copy, save or pin the result.

Translation engines

  • Built-in free engines (Bing, Yandex): work right after installing and are on by default. They use unofficial interfaces that may stop working when the providers change them, so it’s a good idea to keep two or more on.
  • Official APIs: Baidu, Tencent, Youdao, Azure and DeepL. Get a key from the provider’s developer site. Steadier, and most have a free tier.
  • OpenAI-compatible APIs: Ollama, LM Studio or vLLM on your PC, or online models such as DeepSeek, Zhipu and SiliconFlow.

With several engines on, results appear side by side as each one finishes. Every engine has a “Test” button so you can try it.

The text you translate is sent to the engines you’ve turned on. For confidential text, turn off the online engines and use only a model on your PC; see the privacy policy.

Use a local model

  1. Install and run Ollama or LM Studio and download a model (Qwen3, for example).
  2. Settings › Translation engines › Add › OpenAI-compatible API.
  3. For Ollama, enter http://localhost:11434/v1 (LM Studio is usually http://localhost:1234/v1), click “Fetch” to pick the model name, then “Test”.

For reasoning models such as Qwen3, keep “Turn off thinking” on; translations come back 2–5× faster with the same quality.

Glossary

Settings › Glossary: enter pairs such as 三溪 ⇄ Threebrook or 周报 ⇄ weekly digest. They work both ways: whichever side appears in the original is always translated to the other.

  • Language models: the terms used are added to the prompt.
  • Machine translation such as Bing and Yandex: terms are swapped for placeholders before translating and replaced with your wording afterwards.
  • English terms match whole words, ignoring case; longer terms win.

Recognize other languages

Screenshot text is recognized with the OCR built into Windows: offline and adding nothing to the download. It follows your system language by default.

To recognize Japanese, Korean, Thai and others: Windows Settings › Time & language › Language › add that language (with “Optical character recognition”), then choose it in Threebrook Interpret’s Settings › Screenshot and OCR.

Clipboard history

Press Alt+H. Text and images you’ve copied are listed; pick one and press Enter to paste it into the window you were in. By default it keeps up to 500 items for 30 days; turn it off, change the limits or clear it in Settings › Clipboard history. Content that password managers and similar apps mark as “do not record” is skipped.

Data, portable version and uninstalling

  • The installed version keeps settings and history in %AppData%\ThreebrookInterpret; the portable version keeps them in the data folder next to the program, so you can move the whole folder.
  • API keys are encrypted with Windows Data Protection and only your Windows user on this PC can read them; re-enter them on a new PC or user.
  • Saved screenshots go to a “Threebrook Interpret” folder in Pictures by default.
  • To uninstall, find Threebrook Interpret in Windows Settings › Apps. Settings and history are kept unless you tick the box to delete them.

Still stuck?

Write to support@threebrook.com with your Windows version, Threebrook Interpret version and what happened. If something went wrong, error.log in the data folder above helps.