OCR Foreign Language Text on Mac: Copy Characters You Can't Type

To copy foreign text you cannot type, let the Mac recognize the characters and put them on the clipboard for you. Live Text does this inside images in Apple's apps, and a screen OCR app does it for text anywhere on screen.

Short answer: use Live Text when the text is in an image in Preview or Photos; for anything else, use a screen OCR app. My pick for this is Optic, a menu bar app that copies the text in any area you drag across the screen ($4.99, a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store).

Disclosure: I build Optic.

Why foreign text is hard to copy

You see a Japanese label in a photo, a Polish form someone scanned, or Russian text in a video tutorial. You want the characters: to look them up, to send them to a colleague, to put them in a document. Typing them yourself means installing a keyboard layout and learning its input method, just to copy a few words. And if the text is in an image or a video frame, you cannot select it even in your own language.

Try Live Text first

macOS Live Text recognizes text in images, and it works where Apple supports it: images in Preview, Photos, Quick Look and Safari, and paused video frames in some players. It does not work on arbitrary app windows, video calls or UI text. Apple lists the languages Live Text supports in its own documentation. If your text is in a photo or screenshot you can open in Preview, try selecting it there first. It costs nothing.

Copy foreign text with Optic

When the text is somewhere Live Text does not reach, Optic reads it straight from the screen.

1. Make sure the text is visible on screen (an image, a document, a paused video, an app window).
2. Click the Optic icon in the menu bar and choose Capture Text.
3. Drag a box over the text.
4. The recognized characters are on your clipboard. Paste them with Command-V into a dictionary, a document or a message.

Recognition uses Apple's Vision framework at its "accurate" level and runs on the Mac, with no internet connection needed.

The 21 languages Optic recognizes

These are the recognition languages in Optic, all switched on by default:

• English
• German
• French
• Spanish
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Japanese
• Korean
• Russian
• Ukrainian
• Polish
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Danish
• Finnish
• Norwegian
• Turkish
• Thai
• Vietnamese

Each language can be switched off in Settings. If you only ever read, say, English and Japanese, you can leave just those two on.

Useful ways to use it

• Dictionary lookups. Having the exact characters, instead of a guess at how they are written in Latin letters, makes a lookup reliable. This matters most for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
• Names and addresses in foreign documents. Copy a name or a street in its original script into your own notes so it stays spelled exactly as written.
• Language study. Grab a new word from a video frame or an image and paste it into your flashcard app.
• Listening to the text. Any capture in Optic's history can be read aloud with the macOS voices, and the language is detected automatically. That helps when you want to hear how a captured sentence sounds.

To hear how a captured sentence sounds, see read text aloud from the screen on Mac; for addresses on foreign letters and labels, see copy an address from an image.

Where Optic does not fit

• Translation. Optic has no translation. It copies the original text, which you can paste into the translation tool of your choice.
• Languages outside the list. Only the 21 languages above are offered. Arabic and Hebrew, for example, are not among them.
• Handwriting. Optic is not made for handwritten text, so do not count on it for handwritten notes. More in OCR handwriting on Mac.
• Files. It does not open image or PDF files. Open them in Preview first so the text is on screen.

Recognition quality also depends on the image: small, blurry or low-contrast text gives weaker results in any OCR app. Check what you paste.

FAQ

How do I copy Japanese text from an image on Mac?

Open the image in Preview and try Live Text first. If that does not work, or the text is in another app, drag over it with a screen OCR app such as Optic and paste the characters.

Does Optic include translation?

No. It copies the recognized text in its original language to the clipboard. You can paste it into any translation tool you like.

Do I need the foreign keyboard layout installed?

No. Recognition produces the actual characters, so you can paste them without ever typing them.

Does foreign language OCR need an internet connection?

Not with Optic. Recognition runs on the Mac, and the app has no network access.

Get Optic on the Mac App Store · All Optic facts. Optic needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later. For a wider comparison, see screen OCR apps for Mac.