Real-time German 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 hears the stream or the meeting, not the room. You never select German — it is detected.

2. 2
   Press Start

   Captions float over the player or the meeting window: the German line on top, English underneath, updating mid-sentence. You can have the translation read aloud instead.

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

   Pick Tingdong Microphone in the call app’s mic menu, or hand an iPhone call to the Mac over Bluetooth. You speak English, they hear German; their German comes back as English captions.

What German word order does to line-by-line captions

German parks the verb at the end of every subordinate clause and splits prefixes off to the far end of the sentence, so the meaning of a long clause is only settled by its last word — exactly what a subtitle translator working one finished line at a time cannot use. Tingdong translates a continuous stream of speech and keeps context across sentences, so a twenty-minute status update reads as prose rather than as a list of half-guesses. Compound nouns, Austrian and Swiss pronunciation, and the very common habit of dropping an English technical term into a German sentence are handled the same way: language is detected per phrase, not set once for the session. Because it works from audio, a DRM-protected stream is no obstacle — see translated subtitles for Netflix for why the picture is never touched.

Frequently asked questions