I don't read Hebrew, so I built a plugin that translates the WhatsApp groups my family depends on
What you need first, so nobody wastes their time: your own OpenClaw gateway, WhatsApp linked to it as a device, and somewhere to deliver — a Telegram bot or any https webhook. If you don't already run OpenClaw, this isn't a five-minute thing.
I live in Israel and I don't read Hebrew. The chats that matter — my kid's kindergarten group, the building's residents, the municipality, work — are all in it, and WhatsApp doesn't translate Hebrew at all. For months my solution was screenshot → Google Translate, several times a day, and I still missed things. Missing a kindergarten announcement is not a small thing when it says the bus leaves earlier tomorrow.
So the plugin watches the groups I choose and sends them to Telegram in Russian:
- voice messages are transcribed and translated. This was the main reason I built it — a large share of what gets posted is a forty-second voice note
- photos of announcements, schedules and menus: the text is lifted off the image and keeps its structure. A weekly kindergarten menu stays a table grouped by day, not one run-on paragraph
- messages are batched, so I get a digest instead of a notification per line
- each group has its own destination chat, its own glossary of names, its own settings
The language pair is configuration, not code — Hebrew→Russian is just what mine is set to.
What it deliberately does not do: it never writes into WhatsApp. Every outbound send is cancelled, and the assistant is not allowed to run on those chats — only the translator sees them. So an instruction planted in a group can't execute anything on my server, and no tokens are spent on other people's conversations.
It runs on whatever model your gateway is configured with. On a subscription that's no extra cost.
openclaw plugins install openclaw-plugin-chat-translator
Source, MIT: https://github.com/RivkindLeon/chat-translator
WhatsApp is the only source implemented so far; Telegram and a generic webhook are the destinations. Adding another is a new file in src/sources/ — the engine doesn't know which messenger it's talking to.