Context menu support for translate using macOS

[hardkrash]

I would like to enable translation of words in the text window using the native Mac translation engine.

Using the built in Mac OS translation requires no third party services and keeps my text on my system

There are various vim translation plugins but they call out to external translation services on the internet.
I prefer to use the offline capable translation in macOS

[ychin]

Interestingly I was just playing around with this recently and got a prototype working:

The big caveat is that the native macOS Translation API (introduced in macOS 15 Sequoia) is, frankly, terrible. It requires SwiftUI (which MacVim does not use) and is kind of a pain to use. The prototype above was instead done using private APIs similar to how native apps like Safari work, but I need to think more about the proper way to integrate this and whether I want to do this (using private APIs is not the end of the world but something I prefer to limit the usage of).

But I agree. Being able to leverage the system built-in translation service is nice. Apple just for some reason made it difficult to properly access it. For example, the new Apple Intelligence Writing Tools "just works" on any user texts and doesn't require much integration at all. I'm not sure why they made this so much more complicated.