Estonian transcription services

Estonian sounds come in short, long and overlong degrees, and the difference between long and overlong distinguishes words and grammatical cases. The alphabet marks short with a single letter and both long and overlong with a double letter, so the overlong degree is invisible in writing. Kalla the flower and kalla the command to pour are spelled the same. The transcriber therefore decides the spelling from the grammar of the sentence, not from the sound.

Because an automated system writes what it hears, and Estonian spelling is not fully determined by what is heard. Tools tend to double or single letters on the basis of duration and produce forms that exist but mean something else — a different case, a different word. In legal, technical and research material those are not typos. The correction pass ends up longer than transcribing natively.

It is the current edition of the Õigekeelsussõnaraamat, the orthographic dictionary of the Institute of the Estonian Language, presented in December 2025 and the basis of the written-language norm since 1 January 2026. Estonian institutions hold their documents to it. We write to it as standard; if your project specifically requires an earlier convention — for consistency with an existing archive, say — tell us.

Estonian declines personal and place names through its case system, so the same person appears in several written forms in one transcript. We fix the base form of each name at the brief — from your speaker list where you have one — and every inflected occurrence follows it. Your glossary of terms is handled the same way.

Finnish is Estonian's closest major relative and a Finnish speaker will recognise a great deal, but the languages are not mutually intelligible in practice, and Finnish has two length degrees and writes both — so the very problem this page is about does not exist for a Finnish speaker and they are not equipped to resolve it. We assign native Estonian transcribers.

Yes. A substantial part of Estonia's population speaks Russian, and mixed recordings are common. We can transcribe both languages, marking each switch, and translate one into the other if the document needs to be read in a single language.

It is normal work. Phone audio, site noise, focus groups and meetings where three people speak at once all get transcribed here; what changes is how long it takes and how much of it a second pass has to resolve. Where a passage is genuinely inaudible we mark it rather than guess, with a timecode so you can check it yourself.

Yes. Send a sample first and we listen to it before quoting, then tell you straight what we expect to get and what we do not. That is a better conversation before you book than after the transcript arrives.

Yes, as a source transcript, an English translation, or the two side by side. The same native transcriber produces the source text and a separate qualified translator works from the original audio rather than from the transcript alone, which is what keeps a mishearing from travelling into the translation.

Clean read suits corporate video, interviews for publication and anything heading for translation: filler words and false starts come out, the meaning stays. Verbatim is what legal proceedings, compliance material and research interviews need, because every utterance and pause is on the record. Your project manager confirms the choice against your end use before work starts.

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.

Every file is quoted on its own terms. Runtime, audio quality, how many people are speaking, the turnaround you need and whether you also want a translation all move the figure, so there is no flat per-minute rate that would be honest across all of them. Send us a sample and we will come back with an exact, itemised number, backed by our Price Match Promise.

Most short files come back within 24 to 48 hours. Length, audio quality and whether you need time-coding or full verbatim all affect it, and a large multi-speaker project is scheduled rather than rushed. Your project manager confirms the timeline before work starts, not after.

In whatever the next step needs: plain text, Word, PDF, Excel, SRT, VTT or your own template, with timecodes and speaker labels set the way you want them. Tell us what happens to the transcript after we send it and we format it for that, rather than handing you a file you have to rework.

Less than people expect: the recording, or even a few minutes of it, its total running time, roughly how many people are speaking, and whether you want verbatim or clean read. Poor audio does not stop a quote, it only changes it, so send it as it is rather than trying to clean it up first. A named project manager comes back with an itemised quote, normally within four working hours.

More than half of enquiries get a reply within thirty minutes during office hours (Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm UK time), and the itemised quote normally follows within four working hours. After that you have one dedicated project manager who owns the job from brief to final file — not a ticket queue, and not a different name on every email. If it is easier, call +44 207 095 5730 and ask for them by name.

Yes, and it is one of the commonest reasons people get in touch. Tell us it is for a pitch and you get a figure you can put in front of your own client, itemised so it stands up to being picked apart, with no obligation and no follow-up sales calls if the pitch goes elsewhere. If it lands, the quote still holds and we already know the project.

Send it over. Our Price Match Promise covers like-for-like work, and because our quotes are itemised you can see exactly what is being compared — which is usually where the gap turns out to be, in a revision pass, a licence or a delivery format that the cheaper figure quietly left out. If it really is the same work for less, we match it.

Yes, and we would often suggest it. One episode, one module, one commercial tells you more about whether we are a fit than any showreel, and it prices the rest of the run properly instead of by estimate. Bigger projects are then planned in clear milestones, so you are signing off the transcripts as they arrive rather than all of them at the end.