Chinese → English Translation
Chinese to English translation on macOS - handles Simplified and Traditional Chinese, produces natural English.
How It Works
Select your text
Highlight the text you want to translate in any application - email, a document, a browser tab, or a chat window.
Press the shortcut
Hit your configured Echoo keyboard shortcut. Nothing is copied to the clipboard and no window opens.
AI translates
Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite infers tense, number and definiteness from context, none of which Chinese marks on the word itself.
Result appears inline
The English replaces your selection with articles and tense restored, and full-width punctuation converted to ASCII.
Example Translation
Chinese (Original)
我们公司致力于为客户提供最优质的产品和服务。如有任何疑问，请随时与我们的客服团队联系。
English (Translated)
Our company is committed to providing customers with the highest quality products and services. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our customer service team.
Translating Chinese to English
Chinese marks neither tense nor plurality nor definiteness, so translating into English means supplying all three from context - and English grammar forces a commitment the Chinese never made. Deciding between the report and a report, or between sent and has sent, is interpretation rather than lookup, and getting it wrong changes the meaning. Chinese also omits subjects freely when they are recoverable, leaving English to reinstate them. Chengyu, the four-character idioms that compress a whole story into four syllables, have no English equivalent and have to be paraphrased rather than translated. Punctuation is full-width and must be converted. Chinese source text is compact, so English output typically runs roughly twice the length.
Recommended Setup
Best model for this pair
Claude Sonnet 4.5 handles Chinese to English best in our testing. Any provider you have configured will work - this is the one to pick if you have a choice.
Voice dictation
Dictation is supported for Chinese, so you can speak instead of typing and have the result translated in the same step.
Tips for Better Translations
Echoo handles both Simplified and Traditional Chinese input automatically - no need to specify which variant.
Chinese four-character idioms (成语/chéngyǔ) are translated with appropriate English equivalents or explanations.
The AI understands context-dependent Chinese characters that have multiple meanings based on surrounding text.
For classical Chinese (文言文) or literary Chinese, add a note in your command configuration.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. Echoo automatically detects whether the input is Simplified or Traditional Chinese and translates it accurately to English.
AI models recognize common Chinese idioms (成语) and translate them into natural English equivalents or provide contextual explanations when a direct equivalent does not exist.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is recommended for its strong understanding of Chinese context and nuance, producing natural-sounding English output.
Yes. Echoo correctly handles text that mixes Chinese characters with English words, numbers, and technical terms.
Explore More
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Anthropic Integration
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Google Gemini Integration
Connect Echoo to Google Gemini AI for free, fast text transformation on macOS. Gemini Flash Lite offers a generous free tier.
Ready to Try It?
Download Echoo and start translating text with AI shortcuts.