Google Translate gets you 80% of the way. The other 20% — the nuance, the politeness levels, the industry jargon — is where deals are won or lost.
Kerna's translation engine is powered by GPT-5, which understands context, formality registers, and domain-specific vocabulary. The result is translation that reads like it was written by a native speaker, not run through a converter.
Bidirectional Translation
Kerna supports two translation workflows:
Inbound Translation — An email arrives in Japanese. Click Translate and the full message is rendered in English (or your preferred language) in the Kerna sidebar. The original stays untouched.
Outbound Translation — You draft a reply in English. Before sending, select the target language. Kerna rewrites your message in fluent, natural-sounding Spanish, French, German, Polish, or any of the 45 supported languages.
Business-Grade Accuracy
Generic translation tools fail on business communication because they lack context. Consider the English phrase "We need to table this discussion." In American English, it means to postpone. In British English, it means to bring forward for discussion. Kerna uses the full email thread as context to disambiguate.
The engine also handles formal registers correctly. In Japanese, Korean, and German, the level of formality in business correspondence is critical. Kerna detects the appropriate register from the conversation context and applies it consistently.
45 Languages Supported
From major business languages like Mandarin, Spanish, French, and Arabic to regional languages like Czech, Hungarian, and Thai — Kerna covers the full spectrum of global business communication.
How Teams Use It
International sales teams use Kerna to respond to prospects in their native language without hiring translators. Support teams use it to handle tickets from global customers. Executives use it to read reports from international subsidiaries.
One team reported cutting their response time to international clients from 24 hours (waiting for a translator) to under 5 minutes.
Translation is available on Standard, Pro, and Business plans with GPT-5. Not available on the free Starter tier. For teams working across borders, the Business plan adds shared token pools so the entire team can translate without individual subscriptions.