Using macOS System-Wide Translation

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com Today let's look at the new system-wide translation feature for macOS Monterey. 

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A great new feature if macOS Monterey is System-wide Translation. This allows you to select text in a lot of different apps and then have it translated right there. So, for instance, say you're interested in a news article but you can't read the language that the article is in. You can use this feature right in Safari to get a quick translation. So let's translate this headline here. I'm just going to select the text. Now you could Control Click, right click on a mouse or two-finger click on a trackpad, to bring up the Context Menu. One of the items you'll have here is Translate. Select that and you get this special window. This window has a couple parts to it. At the top it has the original text and it tries to guess the language it's in. If it guesses wrong you can always click here and change to another language. Then you can also click here and have the text spoken to you. (speaking of text). 

Then the next part will show you the translation. It's going to default to your language. But you can also change that to another one. You'll see the translation right here and have that spoken to you as well. (speaking translated text)

Then you've got additional buttons at the bottom. Now since this is static text, it's on a webpage, all we have here is Copy Translation. So I can click that and it will copy it to the buffer and I can paste it somewhere else.

Now it could work for several paragraphs of text. Even an entire article. So I can select, for instance, the first few paragraphs here. Bring up the Context Menu and then Translate. You could see I get the translation for both paragraphs right here. Here's it working in another language. You'll see how it instantly figures out the language that this article is in. Correctly guesses its French and translates it to English.

It works in other apps as well. Of course you're going to find most Apple Apps support this but third party apps have to update to add this in. So your favorite app may or may not support it. Here I am in Pages and I can select this text here. Bring up the Context Menu and get a translation. Now when I do that, since this is editable text, in addition to Copy Translation I also have Replace with Translation. If I click that it simply puts the translated text in place of the original.

It will also work in apps like Keynote, Numbers, TextEdit but third party apps, as I said, have to be updated. So, for instance, it won't work right now in Chrome. If you're interested into whether or not it works in something like Microsoft Word, it doesn't. Microsoft Word actually has its own built-in translation feature so who knows whether or not Microsoft will actually support it. Of course anywhere you can copy text you can always copy say to a TextEdit document and use it there. 

Another place it works, of course, is Mail. So I get an email that's in another language which happens to me fairly often I can select the text in the message, bring up the Context Menu and get the translation for it. I can use it in my responses too. I can select the text in here, bring up the Context Menu, translate it. It will even guess based on the context that I probably want it translated into Spanish. Then I could Replace with Translation like that. 

Now there are some options. If you look in the Languages here you'll see Manage Languages. That will take you to System Preferences. There's a button now for Translation Languages. Click that and you'll see a list of the languages with download buttons next to them. You can choose to Download the language so it can work off-line. Now Apple warns that there's a difference between on-line and off-line translation and on-line is always going to be a little bit better. But if you have to do some work where you have spotty Wi-Fi or no Wi-Fi at all then you can certainly download a language and use it off-line. 

Another thing I should point out is Safari already has a built-in webpage translator. That was add in Big Sur. So you can already click on the button up here and then Translate Webpage and translate the entire page. So if you're reading an article on-line and you want to translate more than just a little bit of it it's probably still your best bet to use that. I'm already getting a lot of use out of this. For months now I've had the Beta of Monterey installed on one Mac and if I'm on the other Mac I always seem to run into a situation where I need something translated or somebody sends me a message and I need to translate that and I switch to the other Mac to do it. So this definitely is going to save me some time. I no longer have to go to Goggle Translate and copy and paste the text in to get a translation. 

I think if you communicate with somebody and you're not very strong at speaking or writing their language it's probably better to communicate very clearly in your own language and have something like this translate it for you than to try using your limited vocabulary in that other language in writing the text. 

This also works in combination with live text, another new feature of macOS Monterey. So here in the Photos App or it could be in Preview or even viewing an image in Safari you could select some text and then you can Control Click on it and bring up Translate and it will translate the text for you. Here's another example. (Showing package).

Now this is starting with a limited set of eleven languages. But in the past Apple has started with just a select few languages with features like this and they've added more in the months and years to come. I know that this feature is also available in iOS 15 and iPad OS 15. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.