How to Translate Text Anywhere on Mac (Built In)

You don't need a browser tab open to Google Translate. Since macOS Ventura, translation is built into the right-click menu system-wide: select text in Mail, Notes, Safari, or almost any app, and translate it on the spot. Add downloadable language packs and it even works offline. Here's the whole setup on macOS 13, 14, and 15.

Translate any selected text

1. Select the text in any app — an email, a PDF in Preview, a message.
2. Right-click the selection and choose Translate "…" from the menu.
3. A popover appears with the translation. Use the two language menus at the top to change the source or target language.
4. From the popover you can copy the translation, play the pronunciation with the speaker button, or — in editable text like a draft email — choose Replace with Translation to swap it in place.

The first time you use it, macOS asks whether translations can be processed by Apple's servers. If you'd rather keep text on the machine, download languages for offline use (below) — then translation happens on-device.

Download languages for offline use

1. Open System Settings → General → Language & Region.
2. Click Translation Languages… near the bottom.
3. Click the download button next to each language you want stored locally.

Downloaded packs make translation faster, private, and available with no internet — useful on flights and worth doing for the one or two languages you actually encounter. Each pack takes a few hundred megabytes; remove one from the same list to get the space back.

Translate whole web pages in Safari

For a full page rather than a snippet, Safari has its own translator: open the page, then click the translate button in the address bar (or open the page-settings menu in the address field) and choose Translate to English — or whatever your system language is. Safari rewrites the page in place and the button stays highlighted; click it again and choose View Original to switch back. The set of supported languages is decided by Apple and grows with each macOS release, so a page in an unsupported language simply won't offer the button.

Translate text inside images

Translation also plugs into Live Text. Hover over text in a photo or screenshot — in Preview, Photos, or Quick Look — select it, right-click, and Translate is right there. Menu in a photo from a trip, error message in a screenshot from a colleague abroad: same three clicks. One honest limitation: macOS has no standalone Translate app like the iPhone's, so there's no conversation mode — for live back-and-forth speech you still want the phone in your pocket.

What to expect from the results

Apple's translation covers the twenty or so most common languages — Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, and friends — and the quality sits comfortably in the "understand the email, order the food" tier. For a contract or anything with legal weight, treat it the way you'd treat any machine translation: a first pass, not a final answer. Two practical notes: the source-language auto-detect is very good, so you rarely need to touch the top menus; and if the Translate option is missing from a right-click menu entirely, the app has a non-standard text system — copy the text into Notes or TextEdit and translate it there.

Related trick: define instead of translate

If the word is English and you need its meaning rather than another language, the same right-click menu has Look Up — or use the even faster three-finger tap. Full walkthrough in how to look up a word instantly on Mac.