AiTranslator: translate and improve any text with a single touch

Five AI engines to choose from, 28 languages, microphone dictation, and audio reading, on Windows, macOS, and Linux

Select text anywhere, press F9, and it's translated. There you go, you know the software. You can stop reading here if you're in a hurry.

For the others: I created AiTranslator because I was tired of the obstacle course. Copy the text, open a tab, paste, wait, copy the result, go back to my email. And when it wasn't about translating but making a message a bit more presentable, it was yet another tool. Three services for a four-line paragraph, honestly, no.

AiTranslator stays in the system tray and wakes up with a keyboard shortcut. It translates into 28 languages, it rewrites text in its own language, and it lets you choose which AI does the work: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, or Ollama that runs on your own machine without sending anything anywhere.

How it works

You highlight text in the application you want: an email, a web page, a document, a conversation. You press F9 (that's the default shortcut, it can be changed in preferences if that key is already used for something else). The window appears with your selection already inside.

Then, two buttons. Translate, you get the idea. Improve, that's the button I use most often: it keeps your language and rewrites the text to be clearer, more polite, more professional. Handy for the email you type at 6:50 PM while being vaguely annoyed.

The response displays in streaming, meaning word by word as the model writes, without waiting for it to finish its sentence. On a slightly long paragraph, it changes everything: you read the beginning while the end is being created. A click on Copy and the result goes to the clipboard.

Here's what it looks like on my end, in dark theme, with an English message translated into French:

The little blue badge en in the top left is the source language detected by the AI. Recently it has become clickable: if the detection is wrong, on a short text or a mix of two languages, you impose the correct language and forget about it. At the bottom of each area, the character and word counter. On the right, the microphone and the speaker, which I will discuss just below.

Five AI engines, and you choose

No engine is imposed. You switch from one to another in the dropdown menu of the main window, and each offers several models, from the fast and cheap to the more polished:

• OpenAI : gpt-4o-mini by default, gpt-4o and gpt-4-turbo if you want more finesse.
• Claude, at Anthropic : claude-sonnet-4 and claude-haiku-4-5.
• Gemini, at Google : gemini-2.0-flash and gemini-1.5-pro.
• Grok, at xAI : grok-3 and grok-3-mini.
• Ollama : Llama, Mistral, Qwen, Gemma, whatever you have installed.

The Ollama case deserves a word. It's an AI server that runs on your machine, for free and without an account. No API key to pay, no data leaving your premises, no volume limits. AiTranslator detects it and starts it automatically when you select it as a provider. An old laptop won't work miracles on a large model, but for regular translation with a medium-sized model, it holds up very well.

What I really use every day

The rest has accumulated version after version, generally because I needed it myself.

• Dictation by microphone. One click on the microphone, you speak, your voice is transcribed by Whisper (OpenAI's speech recognition model) and the text lands in the source area, ready to be translated. To dictate three sentences to translate in a meeting, it's much faster than typing them out.
• Audio reading. The speaker reads the translation aloud, with a real synthetic voice and not the robot from 2004. The Auto box starts the reading automatically after each translation. And since version 1.6.3, re-listening to a translation that has already been read is instantaneous and doesn't charge you anything: the audio is kept in memory.
• The tone. Neutral, Formal, Casual, Technical, or Literary. The same text doesn't come out the same depending on the slider, and it also works in Improve mode, not just in translation.
• The glossary. You impose your own translations for your in-house terms, your product names, your industry jargon. The AI respects them instead of reinventing a different word with each call.
• The history. The last 200 translations, with instant search. You can reload an old translation with one click, copy it, or delete it.
• The cache. The last 300 translations remain in memory. The same text translated twice doesn't call the API: immediate result, and zero cents spent.
• The theme. Light, dark, or automatic according to your system's setting.
• Your API keys stay with you. They are encrypted locally, by DPAPI on Windows (the system vault, linked to your user account) and in AES-256 on macOS and Linux. Nothing goes to the cloud except the text you request to translate.
• A backup in .jsonl (a text file with one translation per line), with automatic rotation, to retrieve what has passed through the application.
• The system tray. The application folds into the tray and can launch at startup. It waits for its shortcut without cluttering a window.

Honest precision about the audio: the microphone and text-to-speech work on Windows and macOS. On Linux, it's not hooked up yet; it's on my list. Everything else works on all three systems. And since the transcription and voice go through OpenAI's audio models, both functions require an OpenAI key even if you usually translate with Claude or Gemini.

On the language side: 28 translation languages, from French to Hindi, including Arabic, Japanese, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. The interface itself is translated into 29 languages, so there's a good chance it speaks yours.

Installation, three minutes flat

Download the archive that corresponds to your system at the bottom of this page, and unzip it wherever you want, for example in C:\AiTranslator\ on Windows or in /Applications/AiTranslator/ on Mac.

On Linux and macOS, remember to make the binary executable before the first launch:

chmod +x AiTranslator
./AiTranslator

Launch the application, open the Preferences, and paste the API key from your chosen provider. Or select Ollama and don't paste any key at all. Then, select some text somewhere, F9, and off you go.

Free trial and license

30-day free trial, all features included.

Download AiTranslator and enjoy a full 30 days with no restrictions. Test all AI providers, all languages, all features. No credit card required.

After the trial period, continue using AiTranslator with a “One for All” subscription, a single license that gives you access to all our products. One subscription, all tools.

The online version is 1.6.3, available for Windows, Linux, macOS Intel, and macOS Apple Silicon. The details of what has changed can be found in the release notes, just below the download buttons.