French Canadian transcription services

Because the sounds are not the words. Ordinary Quebec French compresses je suis into chu and drops the l from il and elle, among other reductions, so a literal spelling of the audio would not be standard French at all. A transcript writes the full word the reduction stands for — je suis, not chu — which is a recognition call made by someone who hears the reduced form every day.

Not reliably. A peer-reviewed study of Quebec French speech processing found that automatic tools cannot establish the right segmentation once a vowel is reduced or diphthongised the way it is in everyday speech here — the same pattern behind chu and tab. The failure shows up as a wrong or missing word in the transcript, not as a stylistic difference anyone can shrug off.

No. Dropping the l from il and elle, or collapsing sur le to su'l, is how a normal business meeting or interview sounds in Quebec, not only informal conversation. Pronouncing every letter is what reads as stiff. A transcript still needs the full standard word in every case, so the reduction has to be recognised across formal content as much as casual.

The same way the reference academic corpus for the language does: it transcribes the standard word behind the sound rather than respelling the sound itself. A recording of something close to je sais pas said quickly is written as je sais pas, not as an approximation of what it sounded like. Getting that mapping right, phrase by phrase, is the actual transcription work.

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

There is no flat rate, because no two files take the same work. Runtime, recording quality, how many people are talking, your deadline and whether you also need an English version all move the figure. So does how heavily reduced the speech is — dense, fast, casual audio takes longer to resolve into standard French than a scripted piece to camera. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

Upload is encrypted, the file goes to one named Québécois transcriber who has signed an NDA, and nothing is put through public speech-to-text services at any point. If you have your own confidentiality agreement we sign it, if you have retention rules we work to them, and if your policy says the audio goes once the transcript is approved, we delete it.

In whatever the next step needs: plain text, Word, PDF, 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 — a subtitle pass, a translation, an internal report — and we format it for that, not for us.