Real-time Arabic translation on your Mac

How to set it up

1. 1
   Open Tingdong and choose “Live Listen”

   Set the source to “Screen sound” so it captions the broadcast or the meeting rather than the room. Arabic is detected, not selected.

2. 2
   Press Start

   Captions float over the player or the call window: Arabic on top, English below, updating before the sentence ends. You can have the English read aloud instead of reading it.

3. 3
   For a call, switch to “Call Translation”

   Choose Tingdong Microphone in the mic menu of FaceTime, Zoom, WhatsApp for Mac or Telegram, or hand an iPhone call to the Mac over Bluetooth. You speak English, they hear Arabic.

The distance between news Arabic and the Arabic people speak

The Arabic taught in classes and read on the news is not what a family speaks in Cairo, Beirut, Casablanca or the Gulf — vocabulary, pronunciation and even sentence rhythm differ enough that a learner who follows a bulletin can be lost in a kitchen conversation. Short vowels are also absent from ordinary writing, so a system that leans on text conventions has less to go on than it looks. Tingdong works from continuous speech and keeps context across sentences, which is what carries a dialect conversation further than a line-by-line subtitle translator gets. Language is detected per phrase, so the very common pattern of an Arabic sentence with English or French technical words inside it does not need a setting. Captions are bilingual: the spoken Arabic stays above your English, so you can check a word instead of trusting it blindly.

Frequently asked questions