A bit of context 

In my work as a service designer in Switzerland, I have often had to switch languages. One meeting is in Swiss German; a workshop is in French, and a report is built in English. 

My Apple shortcut system

To quickly translate small texts from one language to another, I’ve created a set of Apple Shortcuts that I can fire up with a quick keyboard shortcut after selecting a text.

In my setup:

• CTRL+Option+E: translates in English

• CTRL+Option+G: translates in German

• CTRL+Option+F: Translates in English

• CTRL+Option+I: Translates in Italian

Download my translation Apple shortcuts templates 

You can download and adapt these shortcuts to use them on your Mac: 

How to adapt these shortcuts

When you open these shortcuts within the Apple Shortcuts app on your mac you can change everything.

The one thing I'd recommend you change is the keyboard combination that fires the automation to something that works for you. You can adapt that by clicking on the "Shortcuts Details" icon on the top right, and then change the shortcut in the field "Run with".

When do I use these translation shortcuts?

As a service designer, one place where these shortcuts have come in very handy is during multilingual workshops. 

I often use a digital whiteboard that I project with a Beamer to capture visual notes of the conversation’s progress, the ideas generated, and the decisions made. 

It feels pretty magic to workshop participants to see a sticky note written in French suddenly be translated into their language on the fly. 

Why do it with Apple shortcut?

Sure, there are other great translation tools, like Deepl, or translation features in tools like Canva. But these do not have the same speed for a quick one-sentence translation.

They often ask you to say in which language the text is written and in which language you want to translate it. 

With these quick shortcuts, the keyboard combination already tells MacOS which language I want to translate the text into. It’s also pretty great at automatically recognising which was the original language without giving the system this information.