AiTranslator: translate and improve any text with a single key

Five AI engines to choose from, 28 languages, microphone dictation and audio playback, on Windows, macOS and Linux, on x64 as well as ARM64

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

For everyone else: I wrote AiTranslator because I couldn't take the obstacle course anymore. Copy the text, open a tab, paste, wait, copy the result again, go back to my email. And when it wasn't about translating but about making a message a little more presentable, that was yet another tool. Three services for a four-line paragraph, frankly, no.

AiTranslator stays in the system tray and wakes up with a keyboard shortcut. It translates into 28 languages, it rephrases text in its own language, and it lets you choose which AI does the work: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, or Ollama which 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 (it's the default shortcut, you can change it in the preferences if you already use that key for something else). The window appears with your selection already in it.

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 more clearly, more politely, more professionally. Handy for the email you type at 6:50 p.m. while being vaguely annoyed.

The response is displayed as a stream, meaning word by word while the model writes, without waiting for it to finish its sentence. On a somewhat long paragraph, it changes everything: you read the beginning while the end is being generated. One click on Copy and the result goes to the clipboard.

Here's what it looks like on my computer, in dark mode, 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 became clickable: if detection gets it wrong, with a short text or a mix of two languages, you impose the correct language and stop thinking about it. At the bottom of each area, the character and word counter. On the right, the microphone and speaker, which I talk about 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 one offers several models, from the fast and cheap one to the more polished one:

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

Ollama deserves a word. It's an AI server that runs on your machine, for free and without an account. No API key to pay for, no data leaving your home, no volume limit. AiTranslator detects it and starts it automatically when you select it as the provider, and if it isn't installed yet, it offers to do it in one click (I'll go into that in a little more detail below). An old laptop won't work miracles with a large model, but for everyday translation with a medium-sized model, it holds up very well.

What I really use every day

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

• Translation both ways. I work in French and English all day, and I used to spend my time changing the target language. Now I never change it anymore: an English text goes into French, a French text goes into English, and a Spanish text goes into my usual language. The second language in the pair is chosen in Preferences, and a small badge displays the language actually selected when it differs from the one I chose.
• The result already in the clipboard. Since 1.7.0, the completed translation lands there by itself. Concretely, I select, F9, go back to my email, Ctrl+V. That's all. Before, I still had to click Copy, and I forgot it one time out of two. You can uncheck it in Preferences if it bothers you.
• Dictation through the 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 clearly faster than typing them.
• Audio playback. The speaker reads the translation aloud, with a real synthetic voice and not the 2004 robot. The Auto checkbox starts playback by itself after each translation. And since version 1.6.3, listening again to an already played translation is instant and doesn't charge you again: the audio is kept in memory.
• The tone. Neutral, Formal, Casual, Technical or Literary. The same text doesn't come out the same way depending on the slider, and it works in Improve mode too, not just in translation.
• The glossary. You impose your own translations for your in-house terms, your product names, your professional jargon. The AI respects them instead of reinventing a different word on every call.
• The history. The last 200 translations, with instant search. You reload an old translation with one click, copy it, delete it.
• The cache. The last 300 translations stay in memory. The same text translated twice doesn't call the API again: immediate result, and zero cents spent. In the same spirit, I fixed a nasty defect in 1.7.0 that I had eventually noticed: a single press on the shortcut would sometimes trigger two complete translations, so twice the bill. Only one call is sent now, and the display no longer starts from zero along the way.
• The theme. Light, dark, or automatic according to your system setting.
• Your API keys stay with you. They are encrypted locally, using DPAPI on Windows (the system vault, linked to your user account) and AES-256 on macOS and Linux. Nothing goes to the cloud apart from the text you ask to translate.
• A backup in .jsonl (a text file with one translation per line), with automatic rotation, to find what went through the application.
• The system tray. The application folds into the tray and can launch at startup. It waits for its shortcut without cluttering your screen with a window.

An honest note about audio: the microphone and read-aloud playback work on Windows and macOS. On Linux, it isn't connected yet, it's on my list. Everything else works on all three systems. And since transcription and voice use OpenAI's audio models, these two features require an OpenAI key even if you usually translate with Claude or Gemini.

As for languages: 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 matches 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 Preferences, and paste in the API key from the provider of your choice. Or select Ollama and don't paste any key at all, the banner will guide you if something is missing. Then, select some text somewhere, F9, and off you go.

Ollama, free AI, in one click

A Windows 11 user wrote to me, a little disheartened: he had chosen Ollama from the list, started a translation, and got an incomprehensible red line talking about “retry”. He was right to complain. Ollama is a separate piece of software, which had to be installed manually, and nothing told him that. Since 1.8.0, that's fixed: AiTranslator takes care of it.

Choose Ollama from the dropdown list in the main window. If something is missing, a banner appears just above the translation, with the right button:

• Install Ollama when Ollama isn't on your computer. On Windows, AiTranslator downloads the official installer while displaying the percentage, launches it, and all you have to do is follow the wizard.
• Start Ollama when it's installed but stopped.
• Download the model when the AI model is missing (the “brain” that does the translation, a large file of a few gigabytes, downloaded only once).

One click takes care of everything that's missing, with a Cancel button in case you change your mind. At the end, the banner disappears and your translation starts by itself. On Mac, AiTranslator opens the Ollama download page: you install it, then click Retry. On Linux, installation requires administrator privileges, so the banner displays the command to paste into a terminal.

For the model, AiTranslator chooses according to your PC's memory, from Google's Gemma 3 models, which know more than 140 languages: the 1B version (0.8 GB) with 8 GB of memory, the 4B (3.3 GB) up to 16 GB, and the 12B (8 GB) beyond that. Nothing stops you from choosing another one in Settings, AI Providers tab, Ollama card: that choice is never replaced. And the model is loaded into memory as soon as the application starts, so the first translation no longer makes you wait.

A trap I've seen come up: Ollama is not installed with npm. If you run into an error like Cannot find module npm-cli.js, it's Node.js complaining, not Ollama. Forget about it, the banner button is enough.

And if you like doing everything by hand, that's still possible: the installer is on the Ollama download page, and the models can be downloaded from the Ollama card in Settings, using the Download button.

Free trial and license

30 days free trial, all features included.

Download AiTranslator and enjoy 30 full days without any 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 the tools.

The online version is 1.8.0, available in six versions: Windows x64 and ARM64, Linux x64 and ARM64, macOS Intel and macOS Apple Silicon. If you have a recent laptop with a Snapdragon processor, or a Raspberry Pi, the ARM64 version is the one you need. This 1.8.0 makes Ollama accessible to everyone: one-click installation from the main window, a model chosen according to your machine and preloaded, and clear messages in the interface language when something is missing. The details of what changed can be found in the release notes, just below the download buttons.