If you're on a Mac or an iPhone, Apple Translate is already there. Select a sentence anywhere in the system, point the camera at a menu, or open the Translate app, and you have an answer on the spot. For a quick look, that's often all you need.
Lexibird is a dedicated translator for people who translate as part of their work. The differences that matter most show up when the content gets longer and more important: you can choose which leading AI model handles it, translate whole files with their layout intact, and keep your terminology consistent with glossaries. It also runs on Windows, not just Apple hardware.
At a glance
| Lexibird | Apple Translate | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Web, macOS and Windows apps, Chromium browser extension | iPhone, iPad, and Mac |
| Translation engine | Choose Claude, GPT, or Gemini models, or let Auto pick | Apple's own models, not selectable |
| Images | Photos, screenshots, and screen-region capture on desktop | Camera and photos |
| Documents | PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and more, layout preserved | No document translation |
| Glossaries | Your preferred terms, shared across a team | None |
| Audio | Transcribe recordings, dictate, listen with adjustable speed | Speak and listen to translations |
| Teams | Shared workspaces, admin roles, single sign-on on Business | Personal, per device |
What is Lexibird?
Lexibird is an AI translator that works the same on a Mac, a Windows PC, or any computer with a browser, which helps when not everyone on your team uses Apple hardware. It's made for the longer, higher-stakes work: contracts, decks, recordings, and team terminology, translated by AI models you choose.
What is Apple Translate?
Apple Translate is Apple's built-in translator for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It translates text and speech, reads text through the camera and in photos, supports bilingual conversations, and can download languages for offline use. Apple has also brought Live Translation into Messages, FaceTime, Phone, and supported AirPods.
1. You choose the model behind the translation
Apple decides how your text is translated, which keeps the app simple. Lexibird lets you pick between Claude, GPT, and Gemini model families, or leave it on Auto. Premium models are available on paid plans.
That choice shows up in the output. Take a line from a partner email: "Let's not reinvent the wheel here, we're already stretched thin." A literal engine tends to translate the wheel and the stretching. Lexibird's AI translation reads the sentence as a whole and renders the meaning, "let's reuse what already works, we're short on capacity", in natural phrasing for the target language. Add the formal tone option and the same message becomes a polite note you could send to a client in German or Japanese without rewriting it.
2. Whole documents, not just sentences
Apple Translate is built for phrases, selections, and conversations. Work often arrives as a file. With document translation, you upload a 40-page PDF contract, a PowerPoint deck, or an Excel price list and get it back translated with the layout preserved. Word documents and Outlook messages work too, in batches of files up to 40 MB each, and uploads are deleted after 24 hours. The alternative is pasting a report into a text box section by section.
3. Glossaries keep your terms consistent
Say your product has a feature called "Workspace" that should never be translated, and your legal team insists "Auftragnehmer" is always rendered as "contractor", never "supplier". Apple Translate has no way to know that.
Glossaries let you list those preferences once, and Lexibird follows them whenever you translate text, in the browser or the desktop app. A term list you already keep in a spreadsheet or translation tool imports in one step, and a shared glossary means support, sales, and marketing all use the same words.
4. A desktop workflow that works on Windows too
Apple's system-wide translation is excellent if every machine in your life is a Mac. Many teams are mixed, with designers on MacBooks and finance on Windows laptops. Lexibird's desktop app behaves the same on both: press its shortcut from any app and it opens with your copied text already translated. When text can't be copied, such as a foreign-language dashboard or an error dialog, you capture that region of the screen and Lexibird reads and translates it.
Colleagues who spend the day in Chrome or Edge can add the browser extension and get translations of selected text in a side panel.
5. Privacy for teams, not just devices
Apple's strength is on-device processing: download a language and translation can happen offline, without your text leaving the phone. That's a real advantage for travel and personal use, and Lexibird doesn't offer offline mode.
Lexibird approaches privacy at the team level. On the Business plan, zero data retention is switched on by default. Your text is handed only to AI providers that keep no copy of it. When none of them is available, the translation stops there and is never retried with a provider that would hold on to your data. The same rule applies on the web, in the desktop app, and in the extension.
Which one should you choose?
If you mostly translate short phrases on your iPhone, often offline or in live conversations, Apple Translate is the natural fit.
Choose Lexibird if you want:
- One translator for every Mac and Windows PC on your team
- Contracts, decks, and spreadsheets translated as files, not pasted in pieces
- Your own terms, applied the same way by everyone
- Leading AI models you choose, for passages up to 20,000 characters at a time
- Business text that AI providers never keep
Try Lexibird on your next document and see how it reads.
