How To Translate Text On Your Mac

Your Mac has a built-in translation feature that works almost anywhere. You can translate text to read it, or to aid in communication. You can even translate text embedded into photos.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how easy it is to translate text on your Mac. 
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Now since macOs Monterey in 2021 your Mac has had the ability to translate text natively across all different apps. So this isn't something just built-in to say Safari. You can do it almost anywhere. Let's start with Safari though. Say you're on a webpage and you've got some text and it's not in the language you speak. You can select text. One of the things you can do with the text is translate it. To bring this up you need the Context Menu. You can get to the Context Menu by Control clicking on the selected area, or two-finger click on a trackpad, right finger click on a mouse. Then one of the options you should see here is Translate. If you select that it brings up this special interface here. It tries to guess what the language is and it will put that up here. But if it gets it wrong you can select another language. Then it will translate to your language or the last selection you made here. So you can have it translate to something else if you like. It puts the translation here and you can scroll through it. Notice there are even Play buttons here and you can have it speak the original text or the translation. At the bottom there are additional buttons. In this case you can Copy translation and now you can paste it in elsewhere. 
As I said it is just not in Safari. It comes in super handy in other apps as well. So, for instance, here in Messages if I get a message and it's not in English, I can select that text, bring up the Context Menu and use Translate. I can get a translation for that the same way I can get it in Safari. You can translate the other way as well if you want. For instance I can type something here and then select it. I'm just going to use Command A for that. Then Control Click on it here and use Translate. It's going to correctly identify the language as English and then I can change this language here when I want and you can see that translation. I can replace with Translation here so I don't have to copy and then paste it. I can just click that and you can see how it replaces it there. 
So here is another example. I'm in Pages. So I can now select text here in Pages. Use the same idea and translate here with the Context Menu. It correctly identifies the language that this is in. I can set the language to go to and there it is. I can just read this or I can have it speak it to me. Or I can Copy it or I can just replace that text since I'm editing here in Pages. 
Now when selecting languages here you'll notice that you only have a small selection of languages. This is actually grown since macOS Monterey. Apple has added more and more and they will continue to do so in the future. You can go here to manage languages which takes you to System Settings where you can see languages that you can download. Then when it is downloaded you can actually do this on device. So it won't be calling out to the internet for translation. 
Now you can also do the same in Photos. This combines two different features of your Mac. One is live text. Being able to select text inside of images. The other is translate. So, for instance here with a picture of a menu I can zoom in on it, although I don't really have to, and notice I get the pointer changing to indicate that I can select text here. So, if I select this text and now I can Control Click on that and the Translate option is there. It will translate that for me. This will work in other apps besides Photos. So I have an image here. I can double-click it and it will open up in the default app Preview. Here I get the text indicator there showing that I can select it. Notice the text is even at an angle here. So it is still picking up what it is and now I can Control Click on it and translate this text.
Sometimes if the text isn't clear or there is a lot of it it may take a second or two for the pointer to change. So you kind of want to wait. Other times it may just not be able to figure out that there is text there at all. You don't even have to open up an image in an app at all. I can select this image here and just use Quick Look. Just press the spacebar. Here in Quick Look use Translate there. On a webpage you can sometimes get translations for images imbedded in the webpage without having to save them or view them independently. So this is just an image that's part of a webpage and it allows me to select the text in there and do the translation for that text. 
But sometimes it can be a little tricky to do this in the browser.  So, for instance here if I try to view this image I can zoom in but the zoom in and out feature is basically preventing me from selecting the text. 
So I'm going to show you a technique that will work in a case like this and in all sorts of different cases where you might not be able to select the text any other way because you can do translations in Screenshots as well. So I'm going to use Shift Command 5 to Open up the controls for Screen Capture. I've got it set to just capture the entire screen and under Options I have it Show Floating Thumbnail. So if I just click on the screen here it will show me the floating thumbnail at the bottom right. I'll click on that and it will bring it up in this little Preview window. So I haven't saved the screenshot because I don't really want to do that. I just want to translate the text. So in this little viewer window here I can select the text that I want. I can Control click on it or bring up the Context Menu anyway I want and then I can translate like that. So this will work in all sorts of different cases when you can't select the text any other way. Now I can just click the Trash button here just to get rid of that screenshot without saving it. 
Now there is a Safari specific translation feature that will translate an entire page for you. So when you first load up a page you may see translation available at the top. That will just be available there for a second. But then the button moves over here. You can click that and you can use Translate to English and it will translate the whole page. Then you can click here again and go to View Original. You also have this ability in the View Menu under Translation. Then you've got the same item here. Goggle Chrome has a similar feature. You can see it right here in the Menu Bar. You can click that and translate a whole webpage to English. You can also select text here and when you Control Click it, right click it, or two-finger click you get a special Goggle Chrome translation feature. It's not the same as what the other apps in your Mac are going to use. This will translate with Goggle. Now the advantage to this is you've got a lot of other languages you can choose from. Goggle has been doing this for a long time. So they have many more available. Also you can go to Translate.goggle.com and here you can paste in text and have it translated and that same huge list of languages is available here. So this is a good fallback if the language you need translated just isn't available as part of the native Mac Translation feature. 
So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “How To Translate Text On Your Mac”

Sheldon

11 months ago

Thanks bunches

Jim Terrinoni

Thank you. I've been going to google.translate forever and this would be a faster way to correspond with my Italian cousins.

Stephen Ryan

10 months ago

I often read German books in iBooks. Sometimes when I highlight a word and select translate, it may say: "Swedish is not supported". Although I can then change the source language to German & it will translate it correctly, why does it try to translate from an unsupported language rather than from the language it actually is in. This is so annoying, particulalry since the whole book is in German and 90% of the time it correctly picks German. It would be nice if one could pre-set source language.

David Taenzer

This is a great video! Unfortunately the Mac WhatsApp program does not appear to work with this feature (sigh). That is the one program where I really need this feature. I can use the screen capture trick and Quick Look as demonstrated but it would be nice to just select the text and use the context menu. Thanks for the great video!

KENNETH STRID

1 month ago

Waiting for Swedish being implemented....