Dari transcription services

No, and we run them as separate services with separate linguists. They share a script and a great deal of vocabulary, but Afghanistan writes its Persian with its own official terminology — pohantun for a university, not dāneshgāh — its own month names, and Pashto woven through institutional speech. A Farsi transcriber will produce readable Persian that an Afghan reader immediately recognises as not written by an Afghan. There is more on the differences in our article on Pashto, Dari and Farsi.

Recognise it and mark it. Pashto is Afghanistan's other official language and it surfaces constantly in Dari-language recordings — in names, titles, agency terms and sometimes whole passages. Where our Dari linguist also covers Pashto, we transcribe those passages and mark the switch. Where they need a Pashto specialist, we say so and bring one in. What we do not do is guess at Pashto as if it were unfamiliar Persian.

As spoken. Afghanistan uses the solar Hijri calendar with the Arabic zodiac names for its months — Hamal, Sawr, Jawzā and so on — rather than the Iranian names. A date given in Sawr stays in Sawr on the page. If your readers need it, we add a Gregorian equivalent alongside rather than replacing what the speaker said.

With the highest level of care we offer. Named transcriber under NDA, encrypted transfer, no public AI tools at any stage, anonymisation to your protocol if you have one, and deletion on delivery on request. If the interview was interpreted, tell us: we can transcribe the Dari, the English or both, aligned.

For the transcriber's ear, yes, and we brief accordingly. On the page, the standard written form is the same; regional vocabulary is kept where it carries meaning and can be marked if the document is a record. If your project is specifically about regional speech, say so and we preserve the forms as spoken.

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.

Because almost every automated system treats Dari as Farsi. It will normalise Afghan vocabulary to Iranian forms, mangle Pashto passages, and has no notion of the Afghan calendar. For material that is usually sensitive to begin with, the correction pass ends up longer than transcribing natively.

Yes, and for Dari material we take it especially seriously. 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, apply your anonymisation protocol, work to your retention rules and delete everything on delivery.

Word, PDF, plain text, Excel or a subtitle-ready file, with right-to-left text set correctly and 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.