Most translation happens in a browser tab. You paste your text into a free service, copy the result out, and think nothing more about it. It is quick, it is usually good, and it involves handing your words to a company whose business is data.
For a holiday menu, fine. For a client's case notes, a patient summary, an internal strategy document or anything covered by a confidentiality agreement, that copy and paste is a data transfer you probably never logged.
The short version: PeekoType translates on your own machine. Pick a language, and the first time you use it a translation pack downloads once. From then on translation runs locally, with no upload, no per-word cost and no connection required. Around 49 languages are available.
How offline translation actually works
The principle mirrors offline speech recognition. Somebody else did the expensive part, once, on their own hardware: training a model on enormous volumes of parallel text. What you download is the finished result, a language pack of modest size that your computer can run without breaking a sweat.
Packs are per language pair, which is why the first translation into French needs a download and every subsequent one does not. Once a pack is on your disk it is yours, and it works on a train with no signal exactly as well as it does at your desk.
Where you will use it
Two places in PeekoType, and they suit different jobs.
In your transcript history. Select any past dictation and press Translate. The translated version replaces the text on screen, with a button to flip back to the original, so you can compare. Useful for turning a note you dictated in English into something you can send to a colleague abroad. See searchable transcript history for how the rest of that window works.
In file transcription. The Transcribe tab has a Translate to setting, so a recorded interview or meeting can be exported in a second language alongside the original, timestamps preserved. That means a subtitle file in another language comes out of the same run rather than needing a separate tool.
Who this is genuinely for
Anyone whose work crosses a language boundary and cannot be pasted into a public website.
Solicitors handling matters with overseas clients. Clinicians summarising notes for a patient who reads another language. Researchers working with interviews in a language their supervisor does not speak. Companies with distributed teams, which we cover in voice typing for international teams. Anyone, really, who has ever hesitated for a second before pasting something into a translation box.
It is also quietly useful for people dictating in their second language. Speak in whichever language comes fastest, then translate. Our guide to multilingual voice typing covers dictating across 100 languages in the first place.
Being honest about quality
Offline translation packs are good. They are not always as good as the very largest cloud systems, particularly on idiom, humour and highly technical or legal phrasing where a single word carries a lot of weight.
For getting the meaning across clearly and quickly, they are excellent. For a contract that will be signed, or marketing copy that must land perfectly, you still want a human translator, and that was true of the cloud services too.
The honest framing is this: offline translation is the right default for everyday work and the only sensible option for confidential material. It is not a replacement for professional translation where the stakes are high, and nobody should tell you otherwise.
The cost argument
Cloud translation APIs bill per character. That is invisible until you translate a two-hour interview transcript, at which point it is suddenly a line item. Running locally, a long document costs exactly what a short one does, which is nothing. Translate the same file five times while you experiment with phrasing and it still costs nothing.
This is the same reasoning behind PeekoType being a single payment rather than a subscription. Once the software is on your machine, using it more should not cost more.
Getting started
Open History, select an entry, press Translate and pick a language. The first use downloads that pack, which takes a moment, and everything after that is instant and offline. The user guide walks through both the history window and the file transcription settings.