Translate Your Clipboard Instantly on Mac
You copy a sentence in one language and need it in another — a reply to a customer, a line from foreign documentation, a message from a colleague abroad. Switching to a browser, opening a translation site, pasting, copying the result, and switching back is five steps too many. On a Mac you can translate whatever's on your clipboard without leaving the app you're in.
The clipboard is already the right place to translate
Almost every translation starts with a copy. So the natural place for translation is the clipboard itself, not a separate website. ClipHistory adds AI transforms directly to your clip history, and Translate is one of them.
Press Cmd+Shift+V to open your clips, select the text you copied, and run Translate. The translated version comes back into your clip history, ready to paste with Cmd+V wherever your cursor is.
How the translation actually happens
ClipHistory doesn't ship a translation engine of its own. Instead it sends the text to the AI provider you've configured with your own API key — Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint. That has two consequences worth understanding:
- Quality follows your model. Modern large language models handle idioms, tone, and context better than older phrase-based translators, especially for full sentences rather than single words.
- The data path is yours. Text goes from your Mac directly to your provider and back. There's no ClipHistory cloud, no account, and no server-side copy. For anything sensitive — contracts, internal messages, customer data — that's the difference between "a vendor has my text" and "only my own AI provider saw it, under my key."
Local by default
Your clip history lives on your Mac. ClipHistory is signed and notarized by Apple and runs as a universal binary on Apple Silicon and Intel under macOS 12+. The only network call involved is the AI request you explicitly trigger.
Translate, then refine
Translation rarely ends at the first output. Because the result is just another clip, you can chain transforms:
- Run Translate, then Rewrite to adjust formality — turn a literal translation into something that reads naturally to a native speaker.
- Run Clean first if the source text has stray formatting, line breaks, or copied UI cruft, so the translator sees clean input.
This chaining is the real advantage of translating inside a clipboard manager: each step's output is immediately available as the next step's input.
Build a translation workflow you reuse
If you translate into the same language often, the friction drops to almost nothing:
- Copy the source text.
- Cmd+Shift+V.
- Run Translate.
- Optionally Rewrite for tone.
- Cmd+V to paste.
For phrases you send constantly — a greeting, a sign-off, a standard reply in another language — save the translated result as a snippet so you can drop it in without re-translating. Snippets and pinned clips both persist beyond the rolling 150-clip window.
When to use this instead of a translation site
- You're replying inside an app and don't want to context-switch to a browser.
- The text is sensitive and you'd rather it only touch your own AI provider.
- You want to refine tone after translating, not just get a literal rendering.
- You translate the same kinds of phrases repeatedly and want them as snippets.
Translating longer passages
Short sentences are easy. For longer passages — a paragraph of documentation, a whole email, a section of a contract — two habits help. First, run Clean before translating if the source came from a webpage or PDF, so stray line breaks and formatting don't confuse the model mid-sentence. Second, translate in coherent chunks rather than fragments; a model translates a full paragraph more accurately than a list of disconnected phrases, because it has the surrounding context to resolve ambiguous words.
If a term comes back wrong — a piece of jargon, a product name that shouldn't have been translated — you can run Rewrite on the output and ask for the correction, since the translated text is just another clip in your history.
It all runs through your own key
The point worth repeating: ClipHistory doesn't bundle a translation service you're paying for on top of the app. It calls the AI provider you connected with your own API key, so you control both the quality and the cost. The app is signed and notarized by Apple, runs as a universal binary on Apple Silicon and Intel under macOS 12+, and stores your clip history locally. There's no account to create and no cloud to opt out of. Open everything with Cmd+Shift+V and the translator is a keystroke away from wherever you're typing.
A built-in translator that lives in your clipboard turns a multi-step browser detour into a few keystrokes, and keeps your text on a path you control.
Ready to put AI to work on your clipboard? Get ClipHistory for macOS ($19.99) — a one-time payment, 12-month license, no auto-renewal. Signed and notarized by Apple, runs on macOS 12+, and everything stays local on your Mac.