Which languages can it translate?

Whatever your connected AI model supports. ClipHistory passes your text and target language to the provider you chose, so coverage matches that model's capabilities.

Can I control the tone of the translation?

Yes. You prompt the model, so you can ask for formal, casual, or region-specific output, and tell it to keep certain terms untranslated.

Do I need a separate translator app or browser tab?

No. Translation happens from your clipboard. You copy, run Translate, and paste the result without leaving your current app.

Is my text sent to ClipHistory?

No. ClipHistory has no cloud or account. Translation requests go directly from your Mac to the AI provider you configured with your own API key.

Instantly Translate Copied Text on Mac

Translation usually means a detour: open a browser tab, paste your text into a translator, wait, copy the result, switch back. Do that a dozen times a day and the friction adds up. If you read or write across languages on a Mac, you can collapse the whole round trip into one shortcut by translating straight from your clipboard.

Translate from the clipboard, paste in place

ClipHistory is a macOS clipboard manager with AI transforms built in, and translation is one of them. Copy the text you need in another language, press Cmd+Shift+V, select the clip, and run the Translate transform. The translated text appears as a new clip, ready to paste into whatever app you're using.

No browser tab, no second translator app. The text you copied from an email, a document, a chat, or a webpage becomes translated text you paste right back where you need it.

Reading vs. writing

Translation cuts both ways, and the clipboard flow fits both:

Reading: You receive a message or document in a language you're not fluent in. Copy it, translate, and read the result, all without leaving your inbox.
Writing: You draft a reply in your own language, then translate it before sending. Because the original stays in your clipboard history, you can keep refining the source and re-translating.

Since you're prompting a model, you can be specific: "translate to formal Spanish," "translate to Brazilian Portuguese," or "translate and keep the technical terms in English." That control is hard to get from a one-size-fits-all translation box.

Pick the provider, keep the data on your Mac

ClipHistory supports five AI providers, Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, or a custom endpoint, and you connect with your own API key. Each translation request goes directly from your Mac to the provider you chose. ClipHistory has no cloud backend and no account: your clipboard history lives locally, and nothing is stored on a ClipHistory server.

The app is a universal binary, signed and notarized by Apple, running natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and requires macOS 12 or later.

A translation workflow you'll actually keep

Copy the text you want translated.
Press Cmd+Shift+V and select the clip.
Run Translate (specify the target language and tone if you want).
Paste the translated clip into your reply or document.

If you translate into the same language all day, save your instruction as a snippet, for example "translate to neutral Spanish, keep product names unchanged." For phrases you send repeatedly in another language, pin the translated clips. Pinned clips are unlimited and aren't bumped by the 150-clip history limit.

Chain it with cleaning

Text copied from PDFs or web pages often arrives with broken line breaks that throw off translation. Run Clean first to normalize the input, then Translate. The translation comes back as connected sentences instead of fragments.

Translation is context, not word swapping

The reason a clipboard model often beats a quick lookup is that it translates meaning, not words in isolation. Idioms, polite forms, and technical terms all depend on context the model can see when you hand it a full paragraph. You can lean into this:

Tell it the audience: "translate for a customer," "translate for an engineer."
Tell it what to leave alone: "keep brand names and code identifiers in English."
Tell it the register: formal for a contract, casual for a chat reply.

These instructions are exactly what a generic translation box can't take, and they're the difference between a translation that reads naturally and one that reads like it was machine-translated.

Real situations it covers

A few concrete moments where translating from the clipboard saves the round trip:

Inbound support in a language you don't speak: copy, translate, understand the request, reply.
Reading documentation or release notes published only in another language.
Posting the same announcement in two languages without juggling tabs.
Verifying a phrase someone sent you before you act on it.

Each is a copy away, and the original stays in your history so you can re-translate with a different instruction if the first result wasn't quite right. That ability to retry cheaply matters: the first translation might be accurate but too formal, or it might keep a term you meant to localize. Because the source clip never goes away, adjusting is just running the transform again with a tweaked instruction, not retyping anything.

One purchase for a daily-cross-language workflow

If you work across languages, translation is a constant, not an occasional task. ClipHistory is a one-time purchase, $19.99 for a 12-month license, with no auto-renewal, so a tool you reach for all day doesn't quietly recur. Because the translation runs on your own API key, you pay your AI provider directly at their rates.

Translate where you read and write, in one keystroke, and keep your text on your own machine.

Get ClipHistory for macOS ($19.99, one-time): https://cliphistory.com/download