French transcription services

Because several verb endings sound identical. The infinitive (-er), the past participle (-é) and the second-person plural (-ez) share the same sound, and for many speakers the imperfect (-ais) merges with them in fast speech. A recording can't tell a transcriber which one was meant — only the sentence's structure can, which is why the ending is worked out grammatically, not by ear.

With a substitution test, the same one taught in French grammar reference works: replace the verb with one from the third group, such as prendre, whose infinitive and participle do sound different. If the sentence would take prendre, the ending is -er; if it would take pris, the ending is -é. Our transcribers apply this sentence by sentence rather than trusting pronunciation.

Yes. Il faudra livrer (it will need to be delivered) and il fallait livrer (it needed to be delivered) sound close enough in running speech to be confused, and one is a future obligation while the other is a past one. In a board decision, a witness statement or a training script, that tense difference changes who was responsible for what and when.

For a large share of speakers, yes, in casual speech. A peer-reviewed 2019 study in the linguistics journal Langue française found the vowel distinction behind this pair is not reliably kept in word-final position in standard spoken French. That is exactly why we don't rely on pronunciation for tense: we read the sentence's logic instead.

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. 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. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise, and we come back with an exact number once we have seen a sample.

Upload is encrypted, the file goes to one named French 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 and we format it for that, not for us.