Compare Apple with optional DeepL using your API key. Keep preferred terms, drag to arrange languages, and read with clearer controls. Apple stays on your Mac.
Read text you cannot copy in games, images and apps, right where it appears on your Mac.
Drag a viewfinder over a game, video, photo, PDF or app window. ViewLingo recognizes the text and lays the translation directly over the original, like AR for your screen. No copying or switching apps. Default screen translation stays on your Mac.
WHY ViewLingo
• Translate text you can't copy: game dialogue, video subtitles, images, scanned pages and app interfaces
• The translation appears in place, fitted to the layout and colors of the original
• Live mode follows changing text in subtitles, games, slides and streams, and holds steady when the screen doesn't change
• Compact controls for Live, Retry, Compare and Close; full-screen controls appear on hover
• Drag languages to add, reorder or remove them in the clearer language settings
• Vertical Japanese, Chinese and Korean text is recognized and translated
• Default screen translation and Live use Apple Translation and Vision on your Mac, with offline language packs
HOW IT WORKS
1. Press the shortcut (fn + Control + Option by default) or choose Create Viewfinder from the menu bar
2. Drag over the text you want to read
3. Read the translation on top of the original. Turn on Live to keep following changes
PERFECT FOR
• Games and visual novels
• Video subtitles, anime and dramas
• Manga, webtoons and photos
• Foreign-language websites, PDFs and presentations
• Confidential documents you'd never paste into a web translator
LANGUAGES
ViewLingo offers every language that both your Mac's text recognition and Apple Translation support, so the list grows with macOS. Setup walks you through downloading each language pack once; after that, translation works offline.
OPTIONAL DEEPL COMPARISON
Compare a selected line with DeepL using your own DeepL API key. Review the source text, up to five earlier lines from the same scene, and up to five terminology entries before sending. Only your explicit request sends this text to DeepL; screen images are not sent. Internet access and a DeepL API account are required. DeepL’s service and data terms apply. Manage saved glossaries in DeepL settings, try preferred wording in a comparison, and copy the result you choose.
PRIVATE BY DESIGN
• Text recognition, default Apple translation and Live run on your Mac
• No account needed for Apple translation; ViewLingo has no analytics or tracking
• Only one permission: Screen Recording, used for the area you select
• Translation history stays on your Mac. Choose how long to keep it or clear it anytime
MADE FOR MAC
• Lives in the menu bar, with customizable shortcuts
• Universal app for Apple silicon and Intel Macs
• Interface in English, Korean, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian
• ViewLingo is a one-time purchase; optional DeepL API charges are separate
Requires macOS 15.0 or later and Screen Recording permission. Download the required language packs before translating offline. ViewLingo translates visible text, not spoken audio. Small, blurred or decorative text can affect results.
Learn more: https://puritysb.github.io/ViewLingo/
This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
Not quite there for Live translation on games.
Sfmrsm575
Update. Bumping up to 4 Stars as developer is continuing to work on and support this wonderful app. It’s a perfect idea and works well for snapshots of text and images, but it can get flaky in Live Mode when playing games. It starts fine and then stoped translating well sometimes. I realized just shifting the app’s capture window a few pixels around improves translation again. On a last note, it would be great to allow option for this to be on the very top of the Z-plane. When using Live Caption (Japanese voice to text) on M4 Mac Mini, Tahoe 26.3.1, the app resides below the translation window layer so there is no capture of the text to translate. Not sure if this is even possible though as it may be a security feature of Live Translate of Apple to make this text unrecordable on the system.
Developer Response
Thank you for updating the review and for the detailed Live Mode notes. We're continuing to improve game and live-capture stability, especially cases where small capture-area changes affect OCR results. The Always-on-Top/Z-plane option is on our roadmap, though Apple's own Live Caption/Live Translate layers may have system-level restrictions. We really appreciate the thoughtful feedback.
Works good for chinese
All good in gen
Im using it to translate come Chinese donghua and it works good, but you need to download all of the languages before it starts working.
Developer Response
Following up on this: since version 2.4.0 you no longer need to download all the languages before starting. Setup completes with just the packs you actually use, and the rest can be added in-app whenever you need them. Thanks again for the review — glad it's working well for donghua!
Promising but some annoying rough edges and UX
jwadamson
Was kind of tricky to figure out how to enable translation working, the live translation sometimes doesn’t detect updated subtitles in video.Additionally while having a video with Japanese subtitles, it keeps popping up a dialog for me to download Tai or Mandarin (traditional) languages. If I set it to specific source➔Target languages it shouldn’t need to prompt for every possible false positive match, or maybe it should know when I decline a language to not auto-prompt it again 10 seconds later.The translation viewfinder also interferes with accessing the preferences dropdown from the menubar icon. I functionally can’t update preferences without dismissing the viewfinder or otherwise making sure they have zero overlap.Related to that, I should also be able to lock the viewfinder so that it doesn’t keep intercepting all drag operations and activating resize behaviors in the target area. That makes it a pretty annoying overlay component to have active if you need to do literally anything with the content underneath.I could bump it to 4 or 5 if I didn’t have to feel like I was constantly having to dance around the viewfinder.
Developer Response
Hi jwadamson — following up on our earlier reply: version 2.4.0 is out, and everything we traced from your review shipped in it.1) Lock mode is in. Lock the viewfinder from the menu bar and every click and drag passes through to the app underneath while Live translation keeps running. Esc once unlocks, twice closes. The oversized resize band is also fixed — moving no longer turns into resizing.2) The language-download prompts now only appear for languages actually on your list, and declining is remembered. The false-positive Thai/Mandarin detections no longer trigger anything.3) The viewfinder can no longer sit over the menu bar, so its icons stay reachable.4) Live subtitles: we fixed one confirmed cause — freshly finished translations were sometimes discarded instead of shown. A second timing-related cause is instrumented and still being measured, so we're not calling that one done yet.Your report shaped this release more than any other single piece of feedback. If 2.4.0 works the way you hoped, we'd be glad to hear it.
Application Won’t Load. Mac OS 26.3.1
Roadend
Had to load all the language packs before it would actually load. Only needed German English at this point. But, it is now working and usable - will update when used more
Developer Response
Following up: as of version 2.4.0, setup no longer blocks until every language pack is installed. You can start with just the languages you need — German and English in your case — and download packs right inside the app. Thanks for reporting this; it read as "the app won't load" to several users, and your report helped us see why.
• Compare the original, Apple and optional DeepL translations side by side, choose your wording and copy the result. Start from the viewfinder or translation history.
• Manage saved glossaries in DeepL settings, and choose the scene context and preferred terms for each comparison. Your key stays in Keychain, with a local monthly character limit.
• Drag to add, reorder or remove languages. Refreshed settings and compact viewfinder controls make the next action easier to find; navigation and toolbars use native glass on macOS 26 and later.
• Explore the translation glass with interactive onboarding examples, alongside a refreshed glass-inspired app icon.
• Default screen translation and Live stay with Apple on your Mac. Optional DeepL requires your own API key, a separate API account and internet; service charges may apply. Only text you explicitly request is sent, never screen images.
Version 3.0.0
The developer, Serendipity Bound, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Linked to You
The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:
User Content
Identifiers
Usage Data
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Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More