Lost in translation
Q
How can I get macOS Monterey to recognise some Japanese characters arranged vertically (tategaki) in a photo and translate them for me?
ATo do this, your Mac needs to bring together two new features which are both system- and language-dependant. Recognising the kanji characters in the photo is the task of Live Text, following which translation services take over to parse and convert those characters into English. Although you can have success without installing anything more than macOS Monterey, sometimes it isn’t that straightforward.
For Live Text to transcribe kanji characters it has to recognise them, distinguishing from noise and patterns from background images. When it does that successfully, the pointer changes to an I-beam for selection. You can sometimes help by tweaking the image but, in this case, where the characters are arranged vertically rather that in horizontal yokogaki, this is likely to fail. If you were to make Japanese the
Even when running an English system, Live Text is able to recognise horizontal kanji text and hand it for translation. primary language in the > System Prefs > Language & Region > General pane, that might help, but you’d then have to navigate your Mac in Japanese.
When available, online translation often works well. Languages supported offline depend on those installed on your Mac, which you change by clicking on the Translation Languages button in the same pane. For this you’d need to download both English and Japanese language support.