Subtitles · Live translation
Subtitles writes down whatever your Mac is playing. Since version 1.3 it can also translate that as it arrives, between any two of the sixteen languages it hears, on the machine, through Apple's own translator. Nothing is uploaded to translate it, which is the only version of this worth building.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
One-time $9 · macOS 15 for translation, 14.2 for everything else · Apple Silicon
Translate To sits under the language picker and starts on Off. Choose a target and captions arrive in that language from the next sentence onwards. Translation Timing below it decides what you see while a sentence is still being spoken, which turns out to be the whole design problem.
Translating a finished sentence is quick: 40 to 125 ms on this hardware, which is nothing next to how long it takes somebody to say one. The real question is what belongs on screen in the seconds before they get to the end of it, and there is no answer that is right for everybody. So there are two, and you pick.
The last second of speech is retranslated on every update and shown dimmed until it settles. Dim text may still change; bright text has stopped. You read a page that mostly stays put, at the cost of the newest few words looking provisional, which they are.
Everything is retranslated on every update. Nothing lags behind the speaker and nothing is held back, and the price is that a line you have already read can be rewritten under you as the sentence reaches the word that changes it.
Underneath both, one rule that is not optional: clauses are translated whole, never the box. The overlay breaks a page wherever the text runs out of room, which lands mid-sentence most of the time, and a fragment translated on its own loses the case, the gender agreement, or a verb the speaker had not reached yet. So what gets translated and what gets shown are two different units, and the page breaks happen afterwards, in prose that already makes sense.
A box that fills up and turns over restarts at the last clause it showed rather than at the word that spilled, so there is a line to re-anchor on instead of a hard cut. Only when it turned over quickly: a box that sat there long enough to read already gave you that.
Translation costs you the thing you were listening to. Holding ⌃ puts it back: the live box and the ⌥ stack both switch to the language being spoken, for exactly as long as you hold the key. The translation carries on underneath while you look, so letting go returns you to current text rather than to the snapshot you left, and each language keeps its own history so the stack never mixes the two.
For anyone learning the language that is the useful shape: read your own when you have lost the thread, and press nothing the rest of the time.
Sixteen languages make 240 ordered pairs, and all of them work. That is why translation is a second step here rather than a setting on the recogniser: speech models that translate while they transcribe are trained to and from English, so French into German would have to go through English, and several of these languages are not in their sets at all. Handing finished text to a translator that covers every pair costs a few tens of milliseconds and covers everybody.
On auto-detect the source language is taken from the recogniser's own language tag, which it knows within a word or two of speech, rather than by asking the translator to guess it one sentence at a time.
The audio never left, and the translated text does not either. It runs through Apple's Translation framework, which is the same on-device translation the rest of macOS uses, so there is no server in this, no key to hold and no account to have. The one network moment is macOS asking to download a language pair the first time you use it, which it does for its own translation too; after that the pair is on disk and there is nothing left to fetch.
Nothing is written down either way. A translated caption is on screen and then it is gone, the same as an untranslated one, and the privacy page is short for the same reason it always was.
Subtitles in the language being spoken, and translation when you want it.
First launch, the permission that fails quietly, and where every switch lives.
Every version so far, and what each one changed.
Captions without the host switching anything on.
Translated captions without Teams Premium.
Translated captions without a paid Workspace tier.
Launch week: $5 instead of $9 until 22 August · 14-day refund
14-day refund, no questions asked
One-time $9, every future update included ·
macOS 14.2 or later · Apple Silicon
Unlimited live captions, for as long as you own the Mac. No minutes to
buy, no account, no subscription.
