I work as a system administrator in a consulting company. Recently, I had to set up remote access for a customer from China, and it turned out to be more difficult than connecting to a European user. Sharing with you what programs I tried and what solution I found.

Is remote access blocked in China?

When you connect remotely to a user with the same localization, there are no language barriers and it goes easily. The same thing with the connection speed. But it’s more complicated with Chinese users.

And it’s not just a problem of the Great Firewall of China, which blocks more than 1 million sites, including not only Google, Facebook, Youtube, but also many remote access services. For example, such software for remote access as Citrix, GoToMyPC, LogMeIn are extremely slow in China or even blocked.

Teamviewer and AnyDesk work tolerably well in large cities as Shanghai, but considering their exorbitant rates, not everyone is willing to buy their subscriptions.

The problem of blocking can be solved by ExpressVPN. It allows connecting remotely to Chinese users from other countries, including Europe. But this is not the main problem. The real difficulty starts when you see the Chinese characters on the system notifications.

And can’t translate them.

Do online translation services help?

When I connected remotely to a сhinese client, I realized that there was some other problem besides the slow connection. Should I mention that I only understood the figures here?

Because of my hectic work schedule, I hadn’t thought of it before connecting and our first session came out rather crumpled. Mr. Chong (let’s call him that) clearly did not expect this turn of events.

I had to quickly install the Google Lens app on my smartphone and use the pointing camera to translate the text. I spent most of my time aiming, which turned a simple task into a real quest.

The next time I was more prepared. I installed the Easy Screen OCR which allows to convert screenshots into text and then translate it. But here I was defeated too — translation in this program is only available on a paid plan.

On the trial version you can only copy text and paste it with Google Translator. As a one-time solution it may work, but I wanted to find a more versatile way to systematically serve customers from different countries without the use of additional software.

And I found it.

Remote Desktop + Translator = Getscreen.me

On Reddit (which is also blocked in China) I was advised to use the cloud service for remote access Getscreen.me.

After searching this software on reputable review sites (Capterra, Trustpilot) I saw quite high user reviews and decided to test it. I connected to my client and tried the solution in practice.

It turned out to be quite convenient — just put the mouse cursor on the Chinese characters and the program automatically translates the text into English or other languages you need. Even system notifications can be translated!

This significantly reduced the time required to provide technical support to my Chinese client. At the end of the session he wrote in the chat 感谢你的工作! 再见 and now I understood him.

First published here