Translate PDFs on your Mac: Preview, Acrobat and any PDF app

Mate for Mac translates the text you select in any PDF viewer. It works the same in Preview, Adobe Acrobat, PDF Expert, Skim and the rest, because it doesn't depend on the viewer at all.

Option 1: right-click › Services

1. Select the text in the PDF.
2. Right-click it and choose Services › Translate with Mate Translate.
3. Mate opens with the translation.

If the Services submenu is missing, the app you're in overrides the context menu. Use option 2.

Option 2: copy, then the shortcut

1. Turn on Auto-translate clipboard in Mate's Settings › General.
2. Select the text, press Cmd+C, then Option+Shift+T.

Mate opens and translates the clipboard. This works in every app, including viewers that hide the Services menu.

Long passages

Mate's input takes up to 20,000 characters, so you can copy whole pages. Pick the Advanced or AI style for text that should read naturally; see Basic, Advanced and AI.

Scanned PDFs

If the PDF is a scan, the text can't be selected because it's an image. Preview on macOS 13 and later recognizes text in scans with Live Text: hover over the page, select the text as if it were real, and use the Services menu. See Translate a scanned document.

PDFs in Safari

Safari's PDF viewer doesn't let extensions in, so the floating button and double-click don't work there. Open the PDF in Preview (click the download button, or drag the PDF to the Dock icon) and use the options above.

On other devices

Translate PDFs on iPhone and iPad · Translate PDFs with the Chrome extension