How to automatically translate while dictating

I write most of my English email by speaking Dutch at it. That sounds wrong until you have tried it, so this tutorial walks through the exact setup: the tray-menu toggle, the two-hotkey arrangement I actually use all day, which language pairs to trust, and where it falls short. For the background — how speech translation works under the hood and why it beats copy-pasting through DeepL — read our speak one language, type another guide and come back here for the setup.

What does automatic translation while dictating mean?

It means the translation happens inside your normal dictation flow, not in a separate app. You click into a text field — an email, a Slack message, a report — hold the hotkey, and speak in the language you think in. When you release the key, the text that appears is already in the target language.

Under the hood it is two steps that feel like one. Whisper first transcribes your speech in the language you spoke it; then, before anything is pasted, an AI pass rewrites that transcript into your target language. Both happen in the gap between releasing the key and the text landing, so you never see the intermediate Dutch (or Spanish, or Japanese) version. That gap is why it feels like one motion rather than dictate-then-translate: there is no window to switch to, no clipboard, no "translate this" step. A realtime preview bar shows the words as you speak, so you can catch a slip mid-sentence and simply keep talking.

How do you set up automatic translation in Lazytype?

Setup takes about two minutes in Lazytype (version 1.8.2):

1. Install Lazytype. Get it from the Microsoft Store (Windows 10 or 11) or as a .dmg for macOS 12+. The 14-day free trial starts without a credit card. After launch, a microphone icon sits in your system tray.
2. Open the tray menu. Right-click the Lazytype microphone icon.
3. Enable Translate mode. Switch the toggle on. Every dictation now goes through a translation pass before the text is typed.
4. Pick your target language. Choose the output language — say, English. That is the only language you ever set: the source is auto-detected, so you never tell Lazytype what you are about to speak.
5. Hold the hotkey, speak, release. Click into any text field, hold the left Ctrl key, say your sentence in Dutch (or any of 100+ languages), and let go. The English text is typed where your cursor is, usually in under a second.

That is the whole setup. It works in every app that accepts keyboard input — Outlook, Word, Slack, browsers, CRMs, code editors — because Lazytype types into whatever has focus rather than living inside one program.

How do you give translation its own hotkey?

The global toggle is fine if everything you write should come out translated. My day does not look like that. I write Dutch to Dutch clients and English to everyone else, often within the same hour, in the same apps. I lasted about two days on the tray toggle — you always discover it was set the wrong way after the text has already landed in the message box.

Voice macros fix this. In Lazytype's settings dashboard you can assign a different AI behaviour to each hotkey, so I run two:

1. Left Ctrl stays plain dictation. Speak Dutch, get Dutch. Speak English, get English. Nothing is translated.
2. A second hotkey carries a translation macro. Its instruction is simply "always translate to English". Hold that key instead, speak Dutch, and English comes out — regardless of what the tray toggle says.

The output language is now decided by which key I hold, and after a day or so it is muscle memory: Dutch colleague, left Ctrl; London office, the translation key. There is no mode to check because there is no mode. You can go further — a third macro for a second target language, or one that rewrites instead of translates ("make this formal") — but the two-key version covers ninety percent of my bilingual day.

Which language pairs work, and where does it wobble?

On the input side, Lazytype auto-detects 100+ languages — the underlying Whisper model was trained on a large multilingual corpus, and its repository lists the full set. On the output side you can pick any target language. Dutch to English, the pair I run all day, is excellent; the major European languages, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are all strong.

Two things to watch. Idioms can come out literal — say the plain version rather than "it cost an arm and a leg". And very technical or niche jargon sometimes gets normalised into a more generic word; I have had a specific Dutch tax term flattened into plain "invoice", which a native reader would query. Rare pairs — Catalan to Polish, say — work but deserve a proofread. The realtime preview earns its keep here: you see the transcription forming while you still hold the key, so a misheard term can be caught and rephrased before anything is typed. For high-stakes messages in a language you cannot check yourself, keep a review pass in the loop.

What does this look like in real work?

English email, Dutch brain. This is my own main use. I know exactly what I want to tell a customer — in Dutch. Composing it in English means translating in my head while typing, and the result still reads slightly stiff. So: cursor in the Outlook reply, hold the translation hotkey, say the whole answer in Dutch, release. The English draft that lands needs a content check, not a grammar check, and that is a much faster read.

Slack with an international team. Chat is where the friction of any separate translation step hurts most, because messages are short and constant — nobody copy-pastes a two-line reply through DeepL forty times a day. With a translation hotkey, answering the Berlin channel takes exactly as long as saying it. And because the plain-dictation key is still there, the Dutch channel gets Dutch without touching a setting.

Reports in a second language. Long-form writing in a language that is not yours is slow for a specific reason: you are editing while composing. Dictating each section in your native language and letting the translation pass produce the English draft splits those jobs. The first draft comes out more fluent because you were actually fluent when you produced it.

Students writing essays. Same principle: get the argument down by speaking it in your mother tongue, then rework the translated draft. There is a side effect worth having — comparing what you meant with how the model phrases it teaches you constructions textbooks skip. More on our dictation for students page.

Support in the customer's language. A ticket arrives in Spanish; you speak English. Dictate the reply in English with Spanish as the target, sanity-check the output, send. Faster than templates, and the customer reads something that feels written for them rather than machine-translated boilerplate.

Does automatic translation work offline?

No, and I would rather say that plainly here than have you find out on a train. Lazytype ships an offline whisper.cpp engine (tray menu → Engine → Local) that transcribes entirely on your device, with no audio ever leaving your machine. But remember the two-step mechanism above: translation lives in the cloud AI pass, and that pass is exactly the part the local engine skips. Offline, you get precisely what you spoke, in the language you spoke it.

In practice that is workable: on the train I dictate Dutch and get Dutch; back online, the same hotkey translates again. If you work under confidentiality rules that require offline mode, plan for transcription only.

Which dictation apps can translate at all?

Translation while dictating is still rare. Most dictation tools — and both operating systems' built-in options — type what you said in the language you said it, full stop:

If dictate-in-one-language, type-in-another is the feature you are buying for, the field narrows quickly. Lazytype is €25 one-time with your own free Groq API key, or €5/month for Pro with hosted transcription — translation included in both.

Written by Bas Niese

Founder of Lazytype. Bas is a Dutch developer who dictates most of what he types — in Dutch and English — and has shipped every Lazytype release since v1.0. More about Bas and Lazytype →