Transcription · Chinese (Simplified)
Simplified Chinese transcription services
Native Mandarin transcribers for corporate meetings, market research, legal material, broadcast and academic recordings from Mainland China and Singapore — written in Simplified Chinese to the state standards for characters and punctuation, with regional speech handled the way your document needs.
About Simplified Chinese transcription
Find the right Simplified Chinese transcription for your project
Simplified Chinese is the written standard of the People's Republic of China and of Singapore, and the form in which almost all Mainland business, legal, academic and media text is produced. It is not simply "Mandarin, written down": what may appear on the page is fixed by state standards, and a transcript that ignores them is not a standard document.
Two of those standards do most of the work. The Table of General Standard Chinese Characters (通用规范汉字表), promulgated by the State Council in 2013, defines the 8,105 characters that count as standard; variants and older forms outside it are not. And GB/T 15834 governs punctuation — full-width marks, the enumeration comma 、, the title brackets 《》 — none of which exists in the audio. A Chinese transcript's punctuation is entirely the transcriber's work.
At GoLocalise, we work with native Mandarin transcribers who write to both standards and know what to do when the recording is not textbook Putonghua, and a project manager who stays across every step — from speaker identification through to proofreading, time-coding and delivery.
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 wordRecords every spoken detail, including pauses, filler words, repetitions and hesitations, exactly as they occur.
Best for
Legal proceedings, compliance recordings, research interviews
Edited
Clean readRemoves redundant words and hesitations while keeping the meaning and the speaker's intent fully intact.
Best for
Interviews for publication, broadcast material, content to be translated
Summarised
Key pointsCondenses the discussion into structured key points rather than a full record of the conversation.
Best for
Meeting minutes, focus-group reporting, internal documentation
What's included
What comes with every Simplified Chinese transcript
Standard characters only
Written within the 2013 Table of General Standard Chinese Characters — no variants, no traditional forms slipping in through a keyboard setting.
GB/T 15834 punctuation
Full-width marks, 、 for lists, 《》 for titles, “ ” for quotation. Placed by a linguist, since the audio contains none of it.
Regional speech handled to brief
Standard written Chinese by default; dialect vocabulary preserved and marked where the research needs it.
Timecodes
Stamped at the interval you need — per speaker turn, per paragraph or at fixed intervals.
Speaker identification
Every turn attributed, by name where you supply them or by role where you don't.
Your format
Word, PDF, plain text, Excel or a subtitle-ready file — 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.
Brief review
We review your audio, the subject matter, any speaker lists and your target output — and listen for how far the speech sits from standard Putonghua.
Transcriber assignment
We match your project to a native Mandarin transcriber with the right subject expertise and, where needed, the right regional ear.
Transcription & quality check
The transcript is produced in standard Simplified Chinese and checked against the source audio, with punctuation, speaker labels and timestamps applied.
Delivery
Clean, time-coded transcripts in your chosen format, on budget and on time.
Tell us where the speakers are from and what the transcript is for. Regional speech is normal in Mainland recordings, and whether it is normalised or preserved is a decision we make with you, not one the transcriber makes alone.
Who we work with
Industries that rely on Simplified Chinese transcription
Mainland China is a market almost every international business is in, sourcing from or researching. These are the briefs we see most.
Corporate
Board and supplier meetings, earnings calls, internal communications and training for companies operating in China.
Market research
Focus groups and in-depth interviews across Chinese cities, where regional speech is the norm.
Legal & compliance
Arbitration, due-diligence interviews, recorded calls and case material, transcribed verbatim.
Broadcast & media
News, documentary and interview material with subtitle-ready templates.
Academic
Fieldwork, oral histories and linguistic research recordings.
Technology & e-commerce
User research, livestream commerce recordings and product interviews.
Confidentiality
Who hears your Chinese audio
Simplified Chinese transcription frequently means commercially sensitive meetings, due-diligence interviews or research recorded with people who agreed to be recorded on particular terms. 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 Mandarin 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.
Simplified Chinese specifics
Mainland Chinese text is set by standard, not by ear. The audio supplies neither the characters nor the punctuation.
A Simplified Chinese transcript is governed by rules that have nothing to do with how the speaker sounded. The Table of General Standard Chinese Characters (通用规范汉字表), promulgated by the State Council on 5 June 2013, lists 8,105 characters in three tiers — 3,500 in common use, 3,000 general, 1,605 for names and specialist terms — and replaces the character lists of 1955, 1964/1986 and 1988. Anything outside it — a variant form, a traditional character, an older graph a speaker happens to use in their own name — is not standard, and a document intended for a Mainland reader, a court or a publisher should not contain it. A transcriber typing quickly on a system with the wrong input setting can breach that on every line without noticing.
Punctuation is the second standard, and it is entirely the transcriber's work, because speech has none. GB/T 15834-2011, in force since June 2012, defines seventeen marks and how they are used: full-width ，。！？；：, the enumeration comma 、 that separates items in a list where English would use an ordinary comma, the title brackets 《 》, and the Mainland conventions — “ ” for quotation, the full stop 。 set low — that differ from Taiwan's. Where a full stop goes, where a clause breaks, whether a pause was a comma or a sentence: in Chinese these are judgments a linguist makes on the page, and they change how a passage reads and, in legal material, what it says.
Then there is the audio itself. A great deal of Mainland recording is not textbook Putonghua. Focus groups in Chengdu, supplier meetings in the north-east, interviews in Shanghai all carry regional speech — different vocabulary, different grammar, sometimes a different language under the Mandarin. The default is to render it into standard written Chinese, which is what a business or legal reader expects. But research often needs the regional forms kept and marked, and a transcriber who normalises by habit has destroyed the data. We decide it with you at the brief, and we say on the page which we did.
Transcription rates
Professional Simplified Chinese transcription
Best for single-speaker interviews, dictation and short corporate content.
- Native Mandarin transcriber
- Verbatim or clean read
- Speaker identification
- Proofreading pass
A complete managed service for legal material, multi-speaker meetings, research corpora and anything that has to stand as a faithful record.
- Everything in Standard
- Standard-character and punctuation check
- Timecodes and speaker IDs
- Regional speech handled to brief
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
Simplified or Traditional — which do I need?
Simplified Chinese is the written standard of Mainland China and Singapore; Traditional is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao. If your recording and your readers are on the Mainland, this is the page. If the material is from Taiwan or Hong Kong, the character forms, the punctuation and often the spoken language are different — see our Traditional Chinese transcription page. If you need both, we produce two documents rather than converting one into the other, because conversion is not one-to-one.
What are the standards you write to?
Two main ones. The Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, promulgated by the State Council in 2013, defines the 8,105 characters that count as standard; we stay inside it. And GB/T 15834, the national standard for punctuation, defines the full-width marks, the enumeration comma and the title brackets and how each is used. Punctuation matters more in Chinese transcription than people expect, because the audio contains none of it — every mark is a decision.
The speakers use a regional dialect. Can you still transcribe it?
Yes. Regional speech is the norm in Mainland recordings, and we match the transcriber to the region where it matters. The question is what you want on the page. By default we render it into standard written Chinese, which is what a business or legal reader expects. For research, we can preserve dialect vocabulary and grammar and mark it. We agree that at the brief and note on the transcript which approach was used.
Can you add Pinyin or an English translation?
Yes to both. Pinyin can be added for names and terms, or as a full parallel line for language-learning or research material. Translation into English or any other language is a separate step from the same team, working from the finished transcript.
Do you handle recorded calls and compliance batches?
Yes, and in volume. Batches of customer calls, supplier calls or QA recordings can be transcribed to your template, tagged and delivered in Excel or whatever your process consumes. Consistency across a batch is where the standards above earn their keep.
How quickly can a Simplified Chinese transcription project be delivered?
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.
Why not run Mandarin audio through an automated tool?
Automated Mandarin is strong on clean, standard speech and weak on everything this page is about: regional accents and vocabulary, homophones that only context resolves, punctuation placed by rule rather than by pause, and character choice within the standard table. On real-world Mainland audio the correction pass ends up longer than transcribing natively.
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.
What formats do you deliver Simplified Chinese transcripts in?
Word, PDF, plain text, Excel or a subtitle-ready file, in Unicode, 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.
Ready to transcribe your Chinese audio?
Send us the files and tell us where the speakers are from — we'll come back with an exact, itemised quote.
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