Awnsy

Awnsy is a macOS menu-bar app that translates text from any screen region, including content you cannot select with a cursor. The workflow is: press a double-⌘C hotkey (or a custom binding), draw a capture box around whatever you want translated — an image, a running video, a game interface, a PDF rendered in a viewer — and the translation streams into a floating window. You can switch target language or model within that same window without reopening anything.

The differentiating feature is on-device text recognition combined with a fully local translation model. The vendor states the built-in model runs offline with no account, no API key, and no telemetry, which means the text in that screenshot of a confidential document never touches an external server. For users who want higher output quality, an OpenAI or Anthropic key can be added and is stored in the macOS Keychain rather than any vendor-side storage.

The tool is written in Swift rather than Electron, so it lives in the menu bar without a persistent Dock presence and carries a smaller memory footprint than browser-based alternatives. That architecture choice also means it is native only — there is no web interface, no API endpoint for other tools to call, and no Windows or Linux version. The unlimited screen translation capability is a paid-only feature; the free tier is capped. macOS 15 and Apple silicon are hard requirements, not soft recommendations.

Awns fits a specific profile: a solo user or small team on Apple silicon who regularly encounters non-selectable text in games, research PDFs, or foreign-language video, and who wants that workflow to stay offline and private. It does not fit any scenario requiring programmatic access, cross-platform use, or volume batch translation of documents.