Awnsy
Menu bar translator for macOS. Select text, press ⌘C twice, and the translation appears over the window. Runs a local model: no account, no key, offline.
Menu bar translator for macOS. Select text, press ⌘C twice, and the translation appears over the window. Runs a local model: no account, no key, offline.
This page is designed to help you find out whether Awnsy is good and if it is the right choice for you.
Awnsy translates text anywhere on your Mac, even text you can't select. Select text in any app and press ⌘C twice, or drag a box over part of the screen, and the translation streams into a small popup right where you are working.
The translation model is downloaded inside the app and runs on your Mac: no account, no API key, works offline, and your text never leaves the machine. If you prefer cloud quality, bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic key, or point it at any OpenAI-compatible server such as Ollama or LM Studio.
How it works
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Details
Pricing: text translation is free and unlimited. Screen area translation is free for 10 uses, then Awnsy Pro: $1.99 per month, $14.99 per year or $29.99 one-time.
Requirements: macOS 15 or later, Apple silicon Mac (M1 or newer). Available on the Mac App Store.
Listed in
Double ⌘C translation
Select text in any app, press ⌘C twice or a hotkey; the translation streams into a popup over the window
Screen area translation
Drag a box over images, scanned PDFs or video; on-device OCR reads and translates the text
On-device translation
Local models run through MLX: no account, no key, offline, text stays on the Mac
78 languages
Target language and model switchable right in the popup
Bring Your Own Key
Use your own OpenAI or Anthropic key, or any OpenAI-compatible server
Read aloud and 14 UI languages
Translations can be read aloud; interface localized into 14 languages
Mac users who work or read in languages that aren't their native one and translate many times a day: documentation, PDFs, emails, chats, screenshots. Especially people who don't want their text to leave the machine, or who need translation offline. Requires macOS 15 or later on an Apple silicon Mac.
The translation model is downloaded inside the app and runs locally on the Mac. There is no account, no API key and no internet needed, and the text never leaves the machine. Three on-device models are included, each covering its own set of languages; the default, Hy-MT2 1.8B, translates a sentence in about a second on an M1 MacBook Air.
It also translates text you can't select: drag a box around an image, a scanned PDF or a video and on-device OCR reads it. Users who want cloud quality can add their own OpenAI or Anthropic key, or use any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
I'm Alexey, a software developer for about 15 years, and Awnsy is my first Mac app. I work in languages that aren't my native one and read a lot of documentation in PDFs, and I got tired of the copy, switch to a browser, paste, read, switch back loop, dozens of times a day.
The first version, in May 2025, was a hotkey that sent the clipboard to the OpenAI API and showed the answer in a popup. It worked, but it needed a key and internet, and the text left the machine. In summer 2026 the translation moved onto the Mac itself: the model downloads inside the app and runs locally. Choosing the model took a script that ran several translation models over the same texts and scored them. The one kept as default, Hy-MT2 1.8B, translates a sentence in about a second on an M1 MacBook Air; the 4B models scored about the same but were 2 to 5 times slower. Double ⌘C and screen area translation came later and are now the two most used ways in.
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