Why one translation is never enough when the relationship is the message

I was drafting a message to a colleague in French — someone I'd worked with for two years but never quite knew how to place on the formality dial. I ran it through Google Translate, got one sentence back, and had no idea if it read as warm, cold, or weirdly stiff. I sent it anyway. I still don't know how it landed.

That's the actual problem with literal translation tools: they return one answer and leave you to guess whether it fits the moment. But in almost any language, the same thought exists in at least three registers — one you'd use with a close friend, one for a colleague, one for someone you're trying to show respect. The gap between those isn't just vocabulary. It's whether you sound like you understand the relationship.

So I built konid. You describe what you want to say, and it returns three options ordered casual to formal, with each register explained and a note on the nuance between them. For "I missed you today" in Japanese, those three options are not interchangeable — the casual one signals intimacy, the formal one signals distance, and knowing which to reach for is half the communication.

Audio pronunciation plays directly through your speakers using node-edge-tts, no external API key required. It covers 13+ languages: Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, and more.

konid runs as an MCP server, so it works inside whatever environment you're already using:

claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai

Also available in Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork. If you're on ChatGPT with Developer mode enabled, you can add it via the endpoint https://konid.fly.dev/mcp.

The thing I actually use it for most is work email — I'm still learning a second language and I've been routing every message through konid before I send. Seeing all three options at once, with the cultural context laid out, is genuinely teaching me something each time instead of just getting me past the task.

MIT licensed. github.com/robertnowell/konid-language-learning