iOS 26: Use Live Translation in Messages

[MacRumors]

In iOS 26, seamless multilingual conversations in Messages are just a few taps away, thanks to Apple's new Live Translation feature. When chatting with friends or colleagues who speak different languages, you can now see instant translations without breaking the flow of your conversation.

Live Translation is an Apple Intelligence feature, so you'll need an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16, iPhone Air, or iPhone 17 model to use it.

Tranlsation works with nine languages including Chinese (Mandarin, Simplified), French, German, Italian, English, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish (Spain). Your messages appear in both languages on your device, while recipients see everything in their preferred language, provided they are using a device running iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or macOS Tahoe.

Setting Up Live Translation

To enable automatic translation for a conversation:

1. Open Messages and tap on the contact's name at the top of a conversation.
2. Toggle on the Automatically Translate switch.
3. Tap Translate From to select the language.
4. Download the language pack if prompted (approximately 900MB).

Once the language pack has downloaded, the feature works instantly. Your outgoing messages display in both your language and the translated version, while incoming messages show the original text with translations underneath.

Using Quick Translation Controls

During active conversations, you can access translation controls directly. Simply tap the "Translating [language]" tab at the bottom of the conversation to switch between viewing modes. For example, select Spanish & English to see both languages, choose English Only to hide translations, or tap Stop Translation to disable the feature temporarily.

Translation on Older Devices

The feature works best when both people have iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or macOS Tahoe, though you can still translate incoming messages from older devices or Android phones – your responses just won't be translated on their end.

Article Link: iOS 26: Use Live Translation in Messages

 

[jdavid_rp]

Maybe I’m mistaken, but what would be so “Apple intelligent” if all iPhones can translate messages tapping on them and pressing translate? Isn’t this the same but just automatically doing it ?

 

[MilaM]

Finally, some more information about the required downloads. 900 MB seems a lot, but I guess there's no way around it when you want to do everything on device. The question is, does the 900 MB download cover all supported language pairs?

No wonder Apple bumped the minimum storage for all iPhones this year. 128 GB is going to feel increasingly inadequate going forward.

 

[Rachid Vàzquez]

Maybe I’m mistaken, but what would be so “Apple intelligent” if all iPhones can translate messages tapping on them and pressing translate? Isn’t this the same but just automatically doing it ?

Nothing than just marketing to artificially inflate the so-called features of Apple Intelligence.
For example, things like auto-mix or the fader to lower the vocal volume in Music don’t need Apple Intelligence at all.
(You can prove it’s a local process by enabling Low Power Mode — the option becomes unavailable.)

On top of that, the Neural Engine in an iPhone 13 is actually more efficient than the one in an M1 chip — the only real bottleneck is RAM capacity, but for translation things it's peanuts.

 

[Big_D]

Doesn't Android (Google Pixel) do this for all messaging apps? I know it does it in WhatsApp and WhatsApp has just added translation into the iPhone version, because iOS doesn't do this itself...

Most of my messages are in English or German, with a smattering of other languages, so I don't really need to the feature much, at the moment, but I could see it being useful, especially if this was at the system level, so that it was consistent between apps.

 

[Big_D]

Maybe I’m mistaken, but what would be so “Apple intelligent” if all iPhones can translate messages tapping on them and pressing translate? Isn’t this the same but just automatically doing it ?

It is skipping the looking at a message you can't read, tapping on it and selecting translate, you set it for the contact to always translate. If you message a lot with people in languages you aren't fluent in, it can save a lot of time. Obviously, if you only need to translate one or two messages every now and then, it isn't really that much of a boon, but if you are getting dozens or hundreds of messages a day in other languages, that is a lot of saved time and stress... Assuming the translations are accurate, I've had lots of problems with translations over the years.

The best was Google Translate, I gave it "do not open the case, no users serviceable parts inside," and it gave me "Gehäuse öffnen, nichts drin" in German (open the case, nothing inside), not really what you want to see in the manual for a 6,000€ device you have just bought! 🤣

Interestingly, if I wrote "don't open the case," it translated it correctly. Google Translate used to have real problems with formal English, but worked fine with abbreviated speech... Just the manual I had written was all in formal English. I did actually manually correct the entries in Google Translate, so they worked after that, which is a good feature, but you obviously have to be fluent in both languages to do that - I had been given 4 hours to translate a 50 page manual from English to German and thought I could save some time, after I stopped rolling on the floor laughing at the results, I went back to my boss and told him it would take a couple of days...

 

[jdavid_rp]

It is skipping the looking at a message you can't read, tapping on it and selecting translate, you set it for the contact to always translate

Yeah, I know what it does, but my question was which step of those makes Apple Intelligence a requirement. If the hard task is to translate and that’s available for any iPhone, what’s Apple Intelligence doing here?

 

[applefella]

i kant wate fur ol theez tipos and mispellings to rooin tranzlayshunz bit ween lang wudjudges

 

[Astuces iOS]

Dude this feature is like only useful to translate scams…

 

[RickDEGH]

I guess Europeans are again locked out. How many Americans chat with people in the languages mentioned vs people who actually live in the countries with the mentioned languages, who struggle everyday to communicate with neighbours, service providers, friends, etc. and could benefit from this feature?

 

[S.B.G]

Too bad the language support is still limited. I wanted to try this and the AirPods translation with some Albanian friends the other day.

 

[MilaM]

I guess Europeans are again locked out. How many Americans chat with people in the languages mentioned vs people who actually live in the countries with the mentioned languages, who struggle everyday to communicate with neighbours, service providers, friends, etc. and could benefit from this feature?

I think Live Translation in Messages is not blocked in the EU. You might need one of the more recent iPhones to use it, not sure.

I can't test this myself, because I have an older iPhone and also haven't installed iOS 26 yet. So please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[kusmii]

too bad, translation only starts AFTER I have configured the contact. Does not help much, if you receive an Italian SMS for the first time (in my case an Italian company) - as translation will only kick-in for news messages AFTER you configured it, so leaving the first conversation untranslated…

 

[Stephen Lovell]

too bad, translation only starts AFTER I have configured the contact. Does not help much, if you receive an Italian SMS for the first time (in my case an Italian company) - as translation will only kick-in for news messages AFTER you configured it, so leaving the first conversation untranslated…

I might be misunderstanding your comment but you can always click and hold on the initial message and choose "Translate". It will translate that one message or you can select "Translate Conversation".

 

[bice]

Your outgoing messages display in both your language and the translated version, while incoming messages show the original text with translations underneath.

I think this is an excellent design choice, for a number of reasons. Top of my mind:

• You will be able to catch some translation errors (if you are at least somewhat familiar with the foreign language)
• It will help people learn, instead of dumbing down people. Repeatedly seeing translatations help understanding foreign languages and build vocabular

These things are important becasue we are flooded with machine-translations and they are notoriously bad at using the right homonym, especially when context isn't easy to detect like in short texts. I'm tired of having stores "Check-out" button read "Look at this" machine translated to my native language. Or the word "since" where machines seems unable to distinguish between the word acting as a conjunktion, adverb or a preposition, when each of these classes may have multiple translations in many other languages than english. E.g the confusion when original text uses 'since' in the meaning 'time passed' while the translation usees a word for the meaning 'because'.


I whish though they didn't tone down the original language so much, with the lower contrast and smaller font.Both should be easily readable.

 

[svish]

Will be very useful. But would like to see more languages supported. Think that might happen only next year with an announcement at WWDC.

 

[Joe Bogger]

The feature works best when both people have iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or macOS Tahoe, though you can still translate incoming messages from older devices or Android phones – your responses just won't be translated on their end.

So how will I know the other person is seeing the translated content? Otherwise I'll just confuse the other party without knowing. Let go Android users.

 

[MilaM]

So how will I know the other person is seeing the translated content? Otherwise I'll just confuse the other party without knowing. Let go Android users.

Most of the world uses other messaging apps anyway. iMessage will be pretty useless when you make arrangement for overseas travel. Fortunately WhatsApp is also introducing translated chats right now, even on iPhones.

 

[Joe Bogger]

Most of the world uses other messaging apps anyway. iMessage will be pretty useless when you make arrangement for overseas travel. Fortunately WhatsApp is also introducing translated chats right now, even on iPhones.

I'm aware of other messaging apps and WhatsApp, you're not answering my question, though.