Real-time Russian 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 video or the call audio rather than the room. You never select Russian — it is detected.

2. 2
   Press Start

   Captions float over the player or the meeting window: the Russian line on top, English below, updating mid-sentence. The translation can also be read aloud to you.

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

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

Free word order means the meaning arrives late

Russian marks who did what to whom with case endings rather than with position, so the same six words can be arranged several ways and the ending of one word decides which reading is correct. Aspect adds a second late decision: whether an action was completed or was going on is a property of the verb, not of an auxiliary at the front of the clause. Both facts punish a translator that sees one finished line with no memory of the previous one — it guesses early and cannot revise. Tingdong translates a continuous stream and keeps context across sentences, which is why a lecture or a long call stays coherent rather than drifting. Names and place names spoken in Russian and then repeated in English are handled without a switch, because the language is detected per phrase among 60+ inputs.

Frequently asked questions