You think in one language, but you have to write in another
You draft a Slack message to a colleague in Madrid, an email to a client in Berlin, a note to a teammate in Tokyo. The ideas come fast in your own language, then stall the moment you have to produce them in theirs. So you open a browser translator, copy the result, and paste it back. Three windows for one sentence.
Dictato collapses that loop. You speak in the language you think in, and once it is set up for that app, the text lands at your cursor in the target language, inside whatever app you are already using.
How translate speech to text works on Mac
Translation in Dictato is an action you assign to a specific app through a profile. Once it is set up, you dictate normally and the words come out translated, dropped right where your cursor sits (a chat box, an email body, a document). No copy-paste step, no separate translator window.
This is different from simply dictating in another language. If you want your speech transcribed in the same language you spoke, that is multilingual voice typing. Translation goes a step further: it converts your meaning into a different language. It is also its own action, separate from proofreading or tone rewriting, so it focuses on getting your point across rather than polishing your phrasing.
Setting up a per-app profile
There is no translate hotkey and no global “translate everything” switch. Translation lives in per-app profiles, which means you decide exactly where it applies.
- Create a profile for the app you want, for example Mail or Slack.
- Set that profile’s action to Translate.
- Pick the target language.
From then on, any dictation in that app comes out in the language you chose. Other apps keep behaving however you set them up. You can have Slack translate to Spanish while Mail stays in your own language.
Which languages you can target
The target-language picker currently offers twelve: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Russian. Translation uses your Mac’s built-in on-device translation, so the available pairs are the ones your Mac supports. The first time you use a new language pair, your Mac may download that language pack once. After that it works without it. A current version of macOS is needed.
Why staying on-device matters
The audio and the translated text never leave your Mac. No cloud round-trip, no account, no API key. For work messages and client mail, that means sensitive wording is not shipped to a server you do not control. It is the same reason local processing matters for everyday dictation, and it is covered by the pay-once lifetime license, no subscription.
A realistic note on quality
The translation is as good as your Mac’s built-in engine produces. Treat the output as a fast, private, good-enough-to-send draft: glance over it before you hit send, the same way you would proofread anything you wrote in a hurry.