English dictation for non-native speakers: now with 13 translation languages

SiteDictation started as a Romanian learning tool. The method is simple: listen to a native speaker, transcribe what you hear, see exactly where you went wrong. Spaced repetition schedules the hard ones back until they stick.

We added English audio last year — the same method, applied to English. What we didn't have was translations. When a Spanish speaker mishears "the alchemist abandoned the desert," they see the diff highlighting what they missed. But they couldn't see what the sentence meant in their own language.

That's fixed now.

What's new

The English dictation app now bundles translations for 13 languages. When you make a mistake on a sentence, the translation in your native language appears automatically — right where you need it, at the moment of error, not buried in a separate tab.

You pick your language once on first launch. The app remembers it. You can change it any time in settings.

Why translations matter for listening practice

The argument against translations in language learning is reasonable: they create a crutch. If you always know what a sentence means before you attempt it, you're translating in your head instead of listening in English.

This app shows translations after you've already attempted the sentence and gotten something wrong. You heard it, you tried, you failed, and now you understand why. That's a very different cognitive moment than pre-reading a translation before the audio plays.

On the accents

The audio comes from Mozilla Common Voice — recordings contributed by volunteers around the world. This means you'll hear American, British, Australian, Indian, and other English accents in the same session.

Some language learning tools treat accent diversity as a quality problem and filter for "standard" English only. We don't. The world's English is not BBC English. If you're learning English to work internationally, communicate online, or travel — you will encounter Indian English, South African English, Singapore English. Training on varied accents is honest preparation, not a compromise.

The app is free to try

The shareware version has 1,000 sentences — enough to run for weeks before you've heard them all. Download it for macOS or Linux, pick your native language, and start. No account required, no internet connection needed after the first download.