Basque transcription services

It is completely normal and it is the main thing to decide before we start. Basque is spoken in a bilingual society, so real meetings and interviews move in and out of Spanish constantly. We can transcribe it as spoken with each switch marked, which is what a faithful record needs, or render the Spanish into Basque for a cleaner read, which is editing rather than transcription. Both are legitimate. Leaving it undecided is the only option that produces an unusable document.

As a rule: if the transcript goes into a file — council minutes, a legal statement, a research dataset, anything that might be relied on later as a record of what was said — transcribe as spoken and mark the switches. If it is a step towards something else, such as an article, a subtitle file or a translation, rendering into Basque usually serves better. Tell us the next step and we will recommend one.

Because Basque counts in twenties. Hogei is 20 and berrogei is 40 — literally two twenties — with hirurogei and laurogei following the same pattern. Turning what was said into digits is therefore not a mechanical conversion, and budget figures, monetary amounts, deadlines and reference numbers are precisely where a slip is costly. Where a document carries figures that matter, we verify them against the audio.

Written Basque means Euskara Batua, the unified standard developed by Euskaltzaindia from 1968, and that is what any institutional or public-facing document should be in. That holds regardless of whether the speakers are using Bizkaian, Gipuzkoan or a continental variety on the recording. If you specifically need the regional forms preserved — for sociolinguistic research, for example — say so and we will do that instead.

No. Basque is a language isolate, unrelated to Spanish or to any other living language, so speaking Spanish gives no access to it at all. Many Basque speakers are bilingual, but that is a fact about people rather than about the languages. We assign native Basque transcribers.

Most short projects are delivered within 24 to 48 hours, but the exact turnaround depends on audio length, audio quality, the number of speakers and whether time-coding is required. Your project manager will confirm the timeline at the start.

Two reasons stack up. Automated coverage of Basque is thin compared with major languages, and the constant switching into Spanish confuses models badly — they tend to produce fluent output in one language or the other rather than an accurate record of a bilingual conversation. Add the base-twenty numbers and the correction pass ends up longer than transcribing natively.

Yes. Files are uploaded through an encrypted system, handled by a named transcriber under NDA, and never fed into public speech-to-text tools. We can sign your own confidentiality agreement, work to your retention rules and delete everything on delivery.

Word, PDF, plain text, Excel or a subtitle-ready file, with timecodes and speaker labels where you need them. Tell us what the transcript is for and we will deliver it in the format the next step requires.