Transcription · Cantonese
Cantonese transcription services
Native Cantonese transcribers for corporate video, eLearning, legal proceedings and more. Verbatim and clean read transcripts, time-coded and delivered to professional and legal standards. Part of a full Cantonese language service: transcripts, subtitles, voice over, and translation of any content you need.
About Cantonese transcription
Where Cantonese is spoken and how it is written
Cantonese is spoken by around 85 million people, in Guangdong and Guangxi, in Hong Kong and Macau, and across a large diaspora. In Hong Kong's 2021 census, 96.0% of the population aged 5 and over reported being able to speak it.
Cantonese has no state language academy. What functions as a standard is the Guangzhou variety as the prestige form, Jyutping for romanisation, and the Hong Kong Government's Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS-2016), which explicitly encodes characters used in Cantonese among the 5,033 locally required characters it covers.
At GoLocalise, we work with professional Cantonese transcribers who are native speakers, and we manage every step — file intake and brief, transcription, time-coding, formatting and final delivery — so the transcript you receive is accurate to the audio and ready for its intended use.
Choose your format
Three ways to transcribe the same recording
The right one depends on what the transcript is for. If you are not sure, tell us the use case and we will recommend it.
Full verbatim
Every wordCaptures every utterance, pause and non-standard pronunciation exactly as spoken, including false starts and overlap.
Best for
Legal proceedings, research interviews, compliance content
Clean read
EditedRemoves filler words, false starts and repeated phrases for readability, while keeping meaning and speaker intent intact.
Best for
Corporate video, interviews for publication, content to be translated
Summarised
Key pointsCondenses the discussion into structured key points rather than a full record of the conversation.
Best for
Executive briefings, legal summaries, research documentation
What's included
What comes with every Cantonese transcript
Cantonese, English, or both
A source transcript, an English translation, or the two side by side. The translation is produced from the original audio, not from the transcript alone.
Timecodes
Stamped at the interval you need — per speaker turn, per paragraph or at fixed intervals, matched to your edit or subtitle workflow.
Speaker identification
Every turn attributed, by name where you supply them or by role where you don't — including through overlap.
Proofreading pass
A second native Cantonese linguist reads the transcript against the audio before it reaches you.
Terminology kept
Legal, medical or technical vocabulary rendered to the convention your sector uses, not paraphrased.
Your format
Plain text, Word, PDF, SRT, VTT or a client-specific template — tell us the next step.
How it works
One project manager, from brief to delivery
A structured workflow, built so accuracy and confidentiality are verified at each stage rather than assumed at the end.
File intake and brief
We review your audio or video, confirm the transcript type (verbatim, clean read, time-coded), and note any terminology, speaker labels or formatting you need.
Transcriber assignment
We match your content to a native Cantonese transcriber with the right background, whether legal, medical, corporate or media.
Transcription and QA
The transcriber works directly from your files. A second linguist reviews the transcript against the audio for accuracy, speaker identification and consistency.
Delivery
Formatted transcripts in your chosen format, whether plain text, SRT, VTT or a client-specific template, on budget and on time.
For multi-speaker research, hearings or archive projects, we assign a coordinated team and agree milestones up front.
Who we work with
Industries that rely on Cantonese transcription
A written record is a compliance requirement in some sectors and an accessibility one in others. These are the Cantonese briefs we see most.
Legal & compliance
Hearings, depositions and arbitration, transcribed verbatim and formatted to requirement.
Automotive & electronics
Technical briefings, supplier negotiations and training material.
Broadcast & media
Interviews, documentaries and archive footage, with subtitle-ready templates.
Market research
Focus groups and interviews, including sessions with heavy speaker overlap.
Business & shared services
Client calls, process documentation and training material.
Academic & research
Lectures, field interviews and research material.
Confidentiality
Who hears your Cantonese audio
Cantonese transcription often means board material from a head office in the head office, arbitration, pre-release production audio or research interviews recorded on the understanding they stay private. So who hears it matters as much as how accurately it is captured.
Your files are uploaded through an encrypted system, handled by a named Cantonese transcriber under NDA, and never fed into public speech-to-text tools. We will sign your own confidentiality agreement, follow your retention rules, and delete everything on delivery if your policy requires it.
Encrypted upload
No loose files over email.
NDA as standard
Yours or ours, before we start.
No public AI tools
Your audio never trains anything.
Deletion on request
Files removed on delivery if you need it.
Cantonese specifics
A Cantonese transcript can read perfectly as Chinese and still not be a record of what was said
Cantonese is spoken; the Chinese that is normally written is not Cantonese. Formal written Chinese in Hong Kong follows Standard Written Chinese, whose grammar and vocabulary are based on Mandarin, so a transcriber who types what a Cantonese speaker meant rather than what they said produces a clean document in which the actual words have been replaced.
Written Cantonese exists as a separate option and uses characters that Standard Written Chinese does not have or uses differently — 佢 for 'he' or 'she', 唔 for 'not', 嘅 for the possessive, 冇 for 'not have', 喺 for 'at'. The Hong Kong Government's own HKSCS-2016 character set lists Cantonese characters among the locally required characters it encodes.
The two systems differ by an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of vocabulary, and most real Hong Kong text sits somewhere on a continuum between them rather than at one end.
So before a single minute is typed, someone has to decide whether the deliverable is a verbatim Cantonese record or a standard-Chinese rendering of it. The two are not convertible after the fact, and only one of them shows what the speaker actually uttered.
Two questions get collapsed into one when a brief says "Chinese", and they have different answers. Which language was spoken decides who transcribes it. Which market the transcript is for decides the characters it is delivered in.
Hong Kong and Macau record in Cantonese and read traditional characters; Guangdong records in Cantonese and reads simplified. Recordings from mainland China outside Guangdong, from Taiwan and from Singapore are normally Mandarin, which is a different language and has its own page.
So the brief we need is the language on the recording and the market the transcript serves. Those two answers fix who does the work and what the file looks like when it arrives.
Transcription rates
Professional Cantonese transcription
Best for clean read transcripts of corporate video, interviews and internal communications.
- Native Cantonese transcriber
- Verbatim or clean read
- Speaker identification
- Proofreading pass
A complete managed service for legal proceedings, multi-speaker research and longer-form content requiring verbatim, time-coded or translated deliverables.
- Everything in Standard
- Subject-specialist linguist
- Timecodes and speaker IDs
- Cantonese and English in one pass
Priced by runtime, audio quality, number of speakers and turnaround, and backed by our Price Match Promise. Send us a sample for an exact, no-obligation quote.
Trusted by global brands
We have used GoLocalise on a regular basis for projects in a number of languages. The service we receive is great. The team is always friendly and professional. The voiceovers we receive are of a very high quality and the turnaround is extremely quick. We are very happy to recommend GoLocalise to other businesses.
It was a pleasure to work with David and the team at GoLocalise. David gave me lots of help and advice, guiding me through my first subtitling project. He really knows his stuff! The experience was completely pain-free. I would not hesitate to recommend GoLocalise – outstanding work at a good price.
They're reliable, adaptive and obsessed with quality. And while you can never be 100% guaranteed of perfection, you can be sure GoLocalise will go the extra mile to get it right every time. We've worked with them now for over 5 years and we are truly thankful to have such a strong localisation partner for our business.
Related services
What happens after the transcript
Transcription in more languages
Native transcribers for interviews, meetings, research, media and legal material. Browse another language, or ask us about yours.
Most common questions
Is written Cantonese the same as traditional Chinese?
No. Traditional and simplified are character sets; written Cantonese is a way of writing the Cantonese language itself. A Hong Kong transcript is normally delivered in traditional characters either way, but it can be written in Standard Written Chinese, which follows Mandarin grammar, or in written Cantonese, which uses forms such as 佢, 唔 and 嘅. The character set and the written variety are two separate decisions.
We recorded interviews in Hong Kong. Should the transcript be in written Cantonese or Standard Written Chinese?
It depends on what the transcript is for. Verbatim written Cantonese is appropriate for research, legal evidence, subtitling and anything where the speaker's own wording matters; Standard Written Chinese is appropriate when the document will be read as a formal report or circulated outside Hong Kong. Most published Hong Kong text mixes the two, so the brief should state which end of that continuum applies.
Can a Mandarin transcriber handle a Cantonese recording?
Not reliably. Cantonese and Mandarin are separate individual languages under ISO 639-3, yue and cmn, within the Chinese macrolanguage zho, and Yue varieties are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. Someone who reads Chinese fluently can still fail to follow conversational Cantonese audio, so the work requires a Cantonese-speaking transcriber rather than a Chinese-literate one.
How will the finished Cantonese transcript be delivered?
In whatever the next step needs: plain text, Word, PDF, SRT, VTT or your own template, with timecodes and speaker labels set the way you want them. Tell us what happens to the transcript after we send it and we format it for that, not for us.
Is my audio kept confidential?
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.
How much does transcription cost?
Every file is quoted on its own terms. Runtime, audio quality, how many people are speaking, the turnaround you need and whether you also want a translation all move the figure, so there is no flat per-minute rate that would be honest across all of them. Send us a sample and we will come back with an exact, itemised number, backed by our Price Match Promise.
How quickly can you deliver?
Most short files come back within 24 to 48 hours. Length, audio quality and whether you need time-coding or full verbatim all affect it, and a large multi-speaker project is scheduled rather than rushed. Your project manager confirms the timeline before work starts, not after.
Ready to transcribe your Cantonese audio?
Send us the files and tell us where the transcript will end up — we'll come back with an exact, itemised quote.
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