Hot tip: how to easily copy text that won't copy/paste

I meant to talk about this in my post about how I use Google Translate to access information in foreign-language records, but I forgot to actually write about it by the end of the post. 😂 Whoops.

I still want to share this trick with y’all, though, because I think it’d be useful to a lot of people. I use this constantly when adding references to church record abstracts on Wikitree.

So, I am sure you have all come across electronic resources that are in a format that doesn’t allow your normal highlight-the-text, copy, paste. Image files, some PDFs, and many e-books fall into this category. One example I use a lot is the Diocese of Baton Rouge church record e-books. These are the same content as in the physically published versions of the records, but you can view them on your computer or Kindle.

When I look up a person in these records and want to cite the entry on Wikitree, ideally I would like to include the text of the entry itself. They are not too long, but they include lots of useful information that is usually not conveyed elsewhere in the biography if the abstract isn’t copied. Especially, there’s often valuable info in the lists of marriage witnesses and godparents.

I can try to copy/paste with Ctrl+V/Ctrl+C as I would with most text on websites, but it just doesn’t work. This is related to Amazon’s constant attempts to lock down their e-books so nobody can use them without paying. However, it’s not copyright infringement to cite a single entry and include the abstracted text.

I could laboriously copy the entry I want by hand, typing out each word. But that’s really tedious, and it’s also pretty error-prone. Instead, I use Google Translate. 😊

On Windows, you can take a screen snip by pressing Windows Key+Shift+S. This lets you draw a box around the part of the screen that you want to copy, and then it’s automatically put in your “Clipboard”, meaning you can now paste that wherever you need to. You can do it on a Mac, too, but I constantly forget the keyboard shortcut for MacOS. I think it’s Ctrl+Shift+Cmd+4. So here I have snipped a single entry from the e-book.

Now I’m going to paste it into Google Translate, in the “images” tab.

It doesn’t matter what you have the “From” language as, but make sure that you are translated TO English (or whatever language your image is in). Click that “copy text” button to the upper right of the image you pasted.

Now you can paste the text wherever you want. This is what I got:

Elisa (Auguste Hyacinthe and Marguerite Eugenie BABIN) m. 22 Oct 1839 [2nd degree consanguinity] Norbert LANDRY, of Iberville (Eloi Joseph and Magdelaine Sidalise BABIN) wit: Adelard Landry; A. M. Babin; Felix Dugas (ASC-10, 60)

This is so much faster and less mentally taxing than typing out the entry. This is how I am able to add so many Wikitree profiles using church records that include the abstracts. Now you have my secret.😂

Small note: occasionally the text will get mixed up a bit, which will usually look something like this:

Elisa (Auguste Hyacinthe m. 22 Oct 1839 [2nd degree consanguinity] Norbert LANDRY, of Iberville (Eloi Joseph and Magdelaine Sidalise BABIN) wit: Adelard and Marguerite Eugenie BABIN) Landry; A. M. Babin; Felix Dugas (ASC-10, 60)

Where one part of the text gets inserted later on in the entry and needs to be moved back to the right spot. It happens maybe 1/50 times I use this, and it’s an easy fix, still easier than typing them out by hand. Just something to be aware of! This works very well for all clear images of printed text.