Danish transcription services

The Retskrivningsloven, in force since 1997, gives the Danish Language Council the authority to fix the orthography and publish it in the Retskrivningsordbogen, and it obliges public authorities, the Folketing, the courts and schools to follow it. A transcript for any of those bodies has to conform to the current edition. We write to it for all Danish work, because it is also simply what Danish readers expect.

The 1948 reform lowercased nouns, replaced aa with å and modernised the modal verbs kunde, skulde and vilde to kunne, skulle and ville. For archive projects we agree whether to modernise the spelling or preserve the historical forms, and apply that consistently. Either way, names and places that still use aa by choice — Aarhus, Aalborg, many surnames — are left as their owners write them.

Because Danish numbers above forty are built on twenties — halvtreds is 50, tres is 60, halvfjerds 70, firs 80, halvfems 90 — and the spoken forms are worn down enough that a slip is easy. In budgets, dosages, dates and contract terms we check spoken figures against the audio rather than converting on the fly.

They will read Danish comfortably and follow much of the audio, but the written standards are different, and so is the vocabulary that turns up in institutional and legal material. For a document that has to conform to the Retskrivningsordbogen, we assign native Danish transcribers.

Yes, and it is a large part of Danish work. Advisory boards, patient interviews and regulatory meetings are transcribed under NDA by named transcribers, to your template and anonymisation protocol, with terminology held to your glossary.

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 output for Danish tends to be plausible-looking text with the wrong words in it — homophones, worn-down numerals and compound nouns are where it slips — and it has no sense of the pre-1948 question or of which aa to leave alone. 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, 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.