How to Translate Text Inside Screenshots on Mac (On-Device, Offline)

Why translate text inside a screenshot?

Screenshots often contain text you cannot easily copy: a UI in a language you don't read, an error message in Japanese, a receipt from a hotel in Italy, a tweet in Korean, a documentation page in German. Until recently the workflow was: take a screenshot, run it through a separate OCR tool, copy the extracted text, paste it into Google Translate, hope no one minded that the receipt just went to a Google server.

Pizazoo 1.0.1 collapses all of that into one click — and keeps every step on your Mac.

How on-device translation works

macOS includes a system framework — Apple's translation API — that runs translation models locally on your Mac. The first time you translate between a given language pair, macOS downloads a small on-device model for that pair. After that, translation runs fully offline.

Pizazoo combines two on-device APIs:

1. Apple Vision OCR extracts the text from your screenshot at import time, locally.

2. Apple Translation translates that extracted text in the inspector, locally.

Neither the image nor the extracted text is ever sent to a server. There is no third-party translation API, no analytics on the translated content, no log of what you translated.

What can you translate?

Anything Pizazoo could OCR. In practice that includes:

• Foreign-language UIs — error dialogs, settings screens, install wizards in another language
• Receipts and invoices captured while travelling
• Documentation and code comments in languages you don't read
• Social media posts, articles, tweets screenshotted from another language
• Menus, signs, transit screens snapped on your phone and AirDropped to your Mac

Math, code, and proper nouns are preserved as-is — the translation focuses on the natural-language portions of the OCR output.

Step-by-step: translating a screenshot in Pizazoo

1. Open Pizazoo and select the screenshot you want to translate.

2. Open the inspector (right side panel). Scroll to the OCR text section.

3. Click Translate. The translation panel slides in beside the inspector.

4. Pick the target language from the dropdown.

5. Read the translation in the side panel. Copy it with ⌘C if you want to use it elsewhere.

First-time-only: macOS will download the on-device translation model for the language pair the first time you use it. This takes a few seconds. Subsequent translations are instant and require no network.

Privacy: what leaves your Mac during translation?

Nothing about the screenshot or its text leaves your Mac. The only network activity associated with translation is the one-time download of an on-device language model from Apple, which is the same download macOS does for the system Translate app. No third-party server sees your translation queries.

This is the entire reason on-device translation exists: it lets you translate sensitive content — receipts with names and addresses, internal Slack screenshots, screenshots of HR or financial documents in another language — without sending that content to a third party.

Translate vs Apple's built-in Translate app

macOS has a built-in Translate app and a Translate option in the Services menu. Why use Pizazoo instead?

• No copy-paste. The text is already extracted at import time. You're one click away from a translation, not three.
• Translation lives next to the image. You can compare the original screenshot and the translation side by side without juggling windows.
• Works across your whole library. Translate any of thousands of screenshots without re-running OCR each time.
• Same privacy model. Both use Apple's on-device translation framework, so privacy is identical.

Frequently asked questions

Does translation require an internet connection?

No, once the on-device language model for your chosen pair is downloaded. The model download itself happens once per language pair and is a few megabytes.

Is the translation as good as Google Translate?

For the major languages Apple supports (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and others), quality is comparable for short snippets like UI text, errors, and receipts. For long passages of literary text, cloud models still have an edge — but that's not the typical screenshot use case.

Does Pizazoo store the translated text?

The translation appears in the side panel for the current session. It is not persisted to the library by default — re-translate on demand. This matches Apple's Translate app behaviour.

Can I translate handwriting in screenshots?

If Apple Vision OCR can read the handwriting (it can for clear printed handwriting; less reliably for cursive), Pizazoo can translate the result.

Which languages are supported?

The languages supported by macOS on-device translation. That list grows with each macOS release — as of macOS Tahoe it covers most major world languages.

Is translation in the free tier or Pro?

Free tier. OCR translation is available to everyone running Pizazoo 1.0.1 or later.

Related guides

• How to Search Text Inside Screenshots on Mac
• Best Screenshot Organizer for Mac in 2026
• Private Screenshot Organization on Mac
• macOS Tahoe Screenshot Organizer — What's New

Download Pizazoo free → — translation included in the free tier.