On screen translation for macOS
Press ⌥A, box the text, and Leafy reads it off the screen and translates it. That covers the things you cannot select: a screenshot somebody sent you, a scanned page, a subtitle burned into a video, an app menu that only ships in one language.
Browser translation handles a web page. It does nothing for a screenshot in a chat, a PDF that is really a photograph, an app whose interface ships in one language, or a frame of video.
So you retype it. Possibly in a script you have no keyboard layout for, which is where the whole idea collapses.
Press ⌥A, drag over the text, and the translation appears in the popup next to the original. The target language switches from the same bar, so you are not going into settings between paragraphs.
If one word is the interesting part rather than the whole line, tap it. You get that word explained inside its sentence instead of a flat rendering of the lot.
Images, video, PDFs, app interfaces, remote desktop sessions, a photo of a sign, a screen share. It reads the screen, so the source never has to cooperate.
Dictionaries hand you every sense a word has ever had. In any given sentence only one of them is live, and picking the wrong one quietly changes the meaning of the paragraph you are reading.
The line the word came from goes into the lookup with it. What comes back is the sense that sentence is using.
The picture is read on your Mac and never leaves it. Translation needs a model, so the recognised text does go out, with nothing attached that says who you are.
Your library stays on your machine. No account, no sync server, no ads. The privacy page spells out exactly what is sent and what is kept.
Free while Leafy is in beta. One download, no account, macOS 14 and up.
Download for MacAlso worth a look: copying text out of any image, subtitles and video, or scanned PDFs.