Overview

Awnsy is a menu bar translator for macOS. Select text in any app and press ⌘C twice, and the translation streams into a small popup over the window. For text you can't select, like images, scanned PDFs or video, you drag a box around it and Awnsy reads and translates it. The translation model is downloaded inside the app and runs locally through MLX, so there is no account, no API key and no internet needed, and the text never leaves the Mac. 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. Users who prefer cloud quality can add their own OpenAI or Anthropic key, or point Awnsy at any OpenAI-compatible server such as Ollama.

Pricing: Free. Text translation is unlimited. Screen area translation is free for 10 uses, then Awnsy Pro: $1.99 a month, $14.99 a year, or $29.99 one-time.

Minimum macOS: 15.0 (Sequoia)

Architecture: Apple Silicon

Key Features

Double ⌘C (or a hotkey) translates the selection in any app, with the result streamed in as it's generated
Screen area translation for images, scanned PDFs and video, on-device OCR
On-device translation via MLX: no account, no key, offline, private
78 target languages; language and model switchable right in the popup
Bring your own OpenAI or Anthropic key, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint
Reads translations aloud
Translation runs on local LLMs (Hy-MT2, TranslateGemma, Qwen3.5) bundled and executed through MLX on the Mac, with optional cloud LLMs via the user's own keys