Literal translation tools give you one answer. That answer has no register, no cultural weight, no sense of whether it sounds like a friend or a legal document. I ran into this trying to tell my girlfriend something personal in her first language — something that should land warm, not clinical. Google Translate returned one option. It was technically correct. It was also completely flat.
So I built konid: it returns three options per query, ordered casual to formal, with the register explained and cultural context for each. The difference between options isn't just vocabulary — it's what the phrase signals about the relationship.
For example, in Japanese there are three genuinely different ways to say "I missed you" depending on who you're talking to and how long you've known them. A single translation collapses that. Three ordered options with notes on each make the choice legible.
How it works
konid runs as an MCP server, so it slots into whatever AI coding environment you're already using:
claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai
From there you ask it anything you'd ask a bilingual friend: "How do I say 'I've been swamped at work' to my colleague in French without sounding like a textbook?" It returns three options — casual, neutral, formal — with a nuance comparison and plays audio pronunciation through your speakers via node-edge-tts. No external API key required for the audio.
It supports 13+ languages: Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, and more. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork. Also installable as a ChatGPT app via the endpoint https://konid.fly.dev/mcp.
The register problem
The use case that drove the design wasn't one-off personal messages — it was daily work email translation. If you're learning a language and translating work correspondence every day, a tool that just gets you through the task teaches you nothing. Seeing three options with the register explained — "this one is appropriate for a colleague you've known a year, this one for a new client, this one only if you're close friends" — makes each translation a small lesson.
The name konid (کنید) is Farsi for "do" — take action. MIT licensed.
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