Catalan transcription services

The Institut d'Estudis Catalans approved a new Ortografia catalana in October 2016. The biggest change was to diacritic accents, which fell from around 150 words to 15 — dóna became dona, véns became vens, and so on. Other changes affected hyphens in compounds with no-, the double r after prefixes, the linking e in some compounds and some apostrophe rules. After a transition period, the new rules have been the only valid ones since 1 July 2021.

For anything that will be filed, published or read by an institution, yes. Public bodies, the public broadcaster, universities and publishers all hold documents to the current orthography, and the old diacritics now read as errors. For a purely internal working document you may not care, and we can follow whichever convention you prefer — but the default is the current standard.

Same language, and the transcript will be accurate either way — but the Valencian Community has its own standard-setting body, the Acadèmia Valenciana de la Llengua, and documents for Valencian institutions are usually expected to follow it. Tell us who the reader is and we will write to the standard they expect.

What was said, with the switches marked, unless you ask us to do otherwise. Bilingual speech is normal in every Catalan-speaking territory and a faithful record keeps it. If the transcript is a step towards publication or translation, we can render the Spanish stretches into Catalan — but that is editing, and we label it as such.

No. Catalan is a distinct Romance language with its own grammar, vocabulary and — the point of this page — its own orthography with its own recent history. A Spanish speaker may follow the gist and will still produce a document full of errors. We assign native Catalan 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.

Automated Catalan is better than it was, but it was largely trained on text written before 2016 and reproduces the old orthography; it also confuses Catalan and Spanish stretches and struggles with apostrophes and contractions. The correction pass to bring it to the current standard 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 — and the ela geminada correctly encoded in all of them. Tell us what the transcript is for and we will deliver it in the format the next step requires.