Traditional Chinese transcription services

No, even though both are in Traditional Chinese. Taiwan and Hong Kong each publish their own standard for character forms — Taiwan's Ministry of Education table and Hong Kong's Education Bureau list — and they differ on a noticeable share of common characters. Punctuation and vocabulary differ too. And in Hong Kong the spoken language is Cantonese, which raises a separate question about how it is written. We assign transcribers by territory and write to that territory's standard.

That is the first thing we ask. Cantonese can be written as standard written Chinese — the form of a report or a contract, which reads naturally to any Chinese reader but is a rendering of what was said — or as written Cantonese, using Cantonese-specific characters, which records the speech word for word. Business and legal documents usually want the first; research, subtitling and local-market content usually want the second. We agree it at the brief and the transcript states which it is.

Not by pressing a button, and we would advise against anyone who offers to. The mapping between the two is not one-to-one — several Simplified characters correspond to more than one Traditional character — and vocabulary and punctuation differ as well. If you need both versions, we produce each one properly, from the audio, to its own standard.

We keep it. Taiwan uses its own terms for many everyday and technical things — the Ministry of Education even publishes a cross-strait comparison list — and a Taiwanese reader notices Mainland vocabulary immediately. A transcript for Taiwan is written in the words Taiwan uses.

Yes. Taiwan's punctuation handbook sets the full stop centred in its square and uses 「」 and 『』 for quotation; vertical layouts carry their own marks. Tell us the destination format — a court bundle, a broadcaster's template, a publisher's layout — and we deliver to it.

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 systems generally output one set of character forms regardless of territory, default to Mainland vocabulary, place punctuation by pause rather than by rule, and handle Cantonese either poorly or by silently converting it to standard written Chinese — which pre-empts the decision this page is about. 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, 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.