A screen translator for the text you
cannot select.

Sep 6, 2026 · 3 min read

Press ⌥A, drag a box around anything on your Mac screen, and click Translate in the popup to read it back in your language. Selectable text, a screenshot, a scanned page, a subtitle burned into a video, a menu in an app that only ships in one language. If you can see it, it can be translated.

The half macOS already handles

Selectable text is a solved problem. Right click, choose Translate, and macOS does it. Safari translates a whole page from the address bar. Preview and Photos will let you pull text out of a still image with Live Text.

Then you hit a scanned PDF, and the cursor selects nothing. Or a subtitle that is part of the picture. Or an app whose entire interface is in a language you do not read, so there is no text to right click in the first place. That is where every one of those routes stops, and it is most of the reason people go looking for a screen translator at all.

Press ⌥A and box it

LeafyApp freezes the screen so nothing scrolls away, and you drag a box over the part you want. The popup opens on the definition of what it read; click Translate in its top bar and the same text comes back translated. The target language sits in that bar too, so switching from Japanese to Spanish is one click and not a trip into settings.

Everything inside the box gets read the same way, and it does not matter whether it started as text, a photograph or a frame of video. The recognition happens on your own machine.

Where it reaches

Scanned PDFs with no text layer. Screenshots someone sent you. Burned in subtitles in IINA, VLC, QuickTime, Plex or a browser tab. App interfaces and installers. Remote desktop and screen share sessions, where the text is only ever pixels on your side. Photos of signs, menus and forms. Games.

Anywhere a browser extension cannot follow, which is anywhere outside the browser.

Already selectable? Skip the box

Highlight text in any app and a small toolbar appears with a Translate button on it. No box, no shortcut to remember. The box is there for the times highlighting does not work, which on a normal reading day is more often than you would expect.

The line stays after the translation goes

Most screen translators are a one way trip. You read the line, you close the popup, and half an hour later the same word shows up again and you translate it again.

Tap a single word inside the box instead of translating the lot, and you get what that word means in that sentence, not the list of every sense it has ever carried. Save it and the sentence goes with it, into a word list you can search, review and export. Two months of reading turns into something you can actually look back at.

That is the part LeafyApp is really built around. The translating is how you get there.

What leaves your Mac

The picture is read on your machine and never leaves it. No screenshot is written to disk or sent anywhere. Translation runs on a model, so the recognised text does go out, with nothing attached that says who you are.

Your word list stays local. No account, no sync server, no ads. The privacy page spells out exactly what is sent and what is kept.

Translate a scanned PDF

A scanned book or article is a stack of photographs. The cursor slides across without selecting anything because there is no text underneath the letters, just pixels. A translator expecting selectable text stops there and gives up.

Press ⌥A and box the line instead. macOS recognises the text off the screen and LeafyApp shows the translation beside it. Open the scanned PDF in Preview, Skim, Zotero, Acrobat or a browser tab. It makes no difference to LeafyApp because it reads what it sees rather than asking the file to give it text.

Academic papers with two columns are their own problem, and locked PDFs that refuse to select anything are worse. LeafyApp handles all of them the same. The page image is read on your Mac and never uploaded. Only the recognised words go out, to be translated.

Preview can offer a free alternative if the file is a still image. Open it and look for Live Text in the Tools menu to recognise words in pictures. For anything else on screen, OCR is your only route, and LeafyApp has it built in.

Translate subtitles while you watch

Subtitles burned into a video are part of the picture, not a separate text track. No subtitle extension can read them because there is nothing to read but the pixels painted on the frame. Pause the video, press ⌥A, and box the line. The recognition happens on your Mac and the translation comes back next to the original.

This works in IINA, VLC, QuickTime, Plex or a browser tab. A video call, a downloaded lecture, a presentation screen, anything with text on screen behaves the same. The one word you did not know can be dragged over separately to see it explained in the sense this scene is using, and saved with the subtitle it came from into your word library.

The whole interaction costs about two seconds, which is the difference between looking something up and deciding it probably was not important. That sentence and that word stay with you, searchable and reviewable later. No need to rewind, no need to pause and retype into a dictionary tab.