OCR Language Support

Cloud Vision API's text recognition feature is able to detect a wide variety of languages and can detect multiple languages within a single image.

Providing a language hint to the service is not required, but can be done if the service is having trouble detecting the language used in your image.

With the release of Handwriting OCR GA images with languages based on the Latin alphabet don't need the languageHints setting when using DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION.

Optional language hints are specified within a request's ImageContext as a list of languageHints for a TEXT_DETECTION and DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION request.

Each language code parameter typically consists of a BCP-47 identifier. This parameter can be of the form language-region, where language refers to the primary language and the optional region refers to a region (usually a country identifier) of a particular dialect. For example, Chinese can be represented as Simplified Chinese as written in the People's Republic of China (zh-CN) or Traditional Chinese as written in Taiwan (zh-TW).

The list of languages (with associated languageHint codes) supported by TEXT_DETECTION and DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION is shown below.

Language Name	languageHints code	Notes
Afrikaans	af
Arabic	ar
Assamese	as
Azerbaijani	az
Belarusian	be
Bengali	bn
Bulgarian	bg
Catalan	ca
Chinese	zh*	New: also supported by DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION.
Croatian	hr
Czech	cs
Danish	da
Dutch	nl
English	en
Estonian	et
Filipino	fil or tl
Finnish	fi
French	fr
German	de
Greek	el	New: also supported by DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION.
Hebrew	he or iw	New: iw also supported by DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION.
Hindi	hi
Hungarian	hu
Icelandic	is
Indonesian	id
Italian	it
Japanese	ja	New: also supported by DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION.
Kazakh	kk
Korean	ko	New: also supported by DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION.
Kyrgyz	ky
Latvian	lv
Lithuanian	lt
Macedonian	mk
Marathi	mr
Mongolian	mn
Nepali	ne
Norwegian	no
Pashtu	ps
Persian	fa
Polish	pl
Portuguese	pt
Romanian	ro
Russian	ru
Sanskrit	sa
Serbian	sr
Slovak	sk
Slovenian	sl
Spanish	es
Swedish	sv
Tamil	ta
Thai	th	New: also supported by DOCUMENT_TEXT_DETECTION.
Turkish	tr
Ukrainian	uk
Urdu	ur
Uzbek	uz
Vietnamese	vi

* Both Simplified Chinese (zh-CN) and Traditional Chinese (zh-TW) are supported when specifying a languageHints code of zh. You may use any of these language codes for recognition of Chinese text.