Bengali transcription services

Often you won't, and that is fine — we check. If the speakers are from the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, or are British Bangladeshi, the odds are high that it is Sylheti, because that is where the great majority of Britain's Bangladeshi community originates. Send us a short sample at the briefing stage and we will tell you what is on it before anything is quoted or scheduled.

Not reliably, and this is the part worth knowing. Comprehension between the two runs mostly one way: Sylheti speakers understand standard Bengali because they grow up with it in school and the media, while standard Bengali speakers rarely encounter Sylheti in formal settings and frequently cannot follow it. So a standard Bengali transcriber may genuinely believe they can do the job and still lose material, particularly in fast, overlapping or emotional speech. We assign a Sylheti speaker instead.

That is your decision and we would rather you made it consciously. Bengali has one standard written form, so putting Sylheti speech into it is closer to translation than transcription — the words on the page are not the words that were said. For accessible, readable output that is usually the right choice. For a court record, a research dataset or a safeguarding file, where the document has to stand as a faithful account, it usually is not. Tell us which the transcript is for.

For a written transcript, yes, in the details. The two share the standard written language but differ in everyday vocabulary and some conventions, and a document written to the other side's usage reads as slightly foreign to the reader. It is not a barrier to comprehension, it is a question of whether the file reads like it was made for the person holding it. Tell us the audience and we will set the conventions accordingly.

Most short projects are delivered within 24 to 48 hours, but the exact turnaround depends on audio length, audio quality and whether time-coding is required. Sylheti material can take slightly longer to schedule because the pool of transcribers is smaller, which is another reason to flag it early. Your project manager will confirm the timeline at the start.

Automated models are trained on standard Bengali, so they degrade sharply on Sylheti and on other regional varieties — and they degrade silently, producing fluent standard Bengali that was never said. On clean, single-speaker standard Bengali audio they can be a starting point. On the health, legal and community recordings that make up most Bengali work, the correction pass ends up longer than transcribing natively.

Yes, and a lot of what we handle does exactly that, particularly recordings made in the UK. Our transcribers work bilingually and mark each switch, so the transcript reads correctly rather than being assembled from two separate passes. Tell us whether you want the English kept as spoken or rendered into Bengali.

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.