Machine Translation
Machine translation is delivered by QuickTrans – an always-on-top popup (and dockable panel) with translations from every enabled provider. See QuickTrans for the full reference.
Opening QuickTrans
| How | Notes |
|---|---|
| Ctrl+Alt+Q (⌘⌥Q on macOS) | Opens the QuickTrans always-on-top popup and starts the MT fan-out immediately on the selected text. Auto-copies the current selection so you don’t need a separate Ctrl+C first. |
| Grid cell right-click → ⚡ QuickLauncher → ⚡ QuickTrans | Right-click menu in the editor. |
| 🔍 Run in SuperLookup button in the popup | After you’ve seen the QuickTrans results, click 🔍 to hand the same query off to Workbench’s SuperLookup tab for a richer concordance / termbase / web look-up. |
Providers
QuickTrans supports these MT providers (subject to your API keys and per-provider on/off flags):
- DeepL
- Google Translate
- Microsoft Translator
- Amazon Translate
- ModernMT
- MyMemory (free)
- Your own OpenAI-compatible MT service – see Custom MT endpoint
Plus optional AI “translation as suggestion” from Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, a custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint or a local Ollama model.
The MT engines’ API keys are entered in Settings → 🌐 MT Settings; the AI providers reuse the keys in Settings → 🤖 AI Settings.
Configure providers
QuickTrans’s provider list and LLM model selectors live in Workbench Settings → ⚡ QuickTrans. Click the ⚙️ cog icon in the QuickTrans popup to jump there in one click.
There’s no Save button: since v1.10.372 each change is saved a moment after you make it, together with the rest of Workbench’s settings in settings.json. The same page also decides whether the popup fetches AI providers automatically or shows a Fetch button for each – see QuickTrans.
Language behaviour
- QuickTrans uses the active project’s language pair by default (or the default pair in Settings → 🌐 Language Pair when no project is open).
- Text in the project’s target language is detected and translated back into the source language.
- The popup’s Languages: row has its own source and target dropdowns and a ⇄ swap button. Changing them fetches the translations again, without affecting your project settings. The choice sticks for later popups until the project’s (or the default) language pair changes.
Performance
Provider calls run in parallel, so the total wait is roughly the slowest single provider, not the sum. Results appear in the popup as they arrive – the first successful one is auto-selected so you can hit Enter without waiting for the slow providers.
Using a result
- Click a result, or press Enter on the selected one, to insert it.
- Number keys 1–9 insert the corresponding result (1 = first, 2 = second, etc.).
- From another application, the chosen translation is pasted over your selection there; inside Workbench it goes into the current segment’s target.