Scottish Gaelic transcription services

Lenition is a grammatical rule that changes the start of a word by adding an H after its initial consonant — required after certain possessives, prepositions, adjectives and numerals. It is not optional spelling: 'mo thaigh' (my house) needs the H to be correct Gaelic. The difficulty for transcription is that the added H can be faint or barely audible in natural speech, so the transcriber applies the grammatical rule rather than relying only on what is heard.

No — writing purely by ear risks both missing a required H and adding one where the grammar does not call for it. Bòrd na Gàidhlig's own teaching materials set out exactly when lenition applies: after possessives like 'mo' and 'do', certain prepositions, specific adjectives and numerals. A transcriber checks the grammatical context of each word, not just its sound.

Yes. Certain consonant clusters — 'sg', 'sm', 'sp' and 'st' — never lenite, regardless of what precedes them, and a small number of other words resist it by convention. Knowing the exceptions matters as much as knowing the rule, which is why Gaelic transcription is handled by a native linguist rather than a general spelling pass applied mechanically across the file.

It is a required grammatical marker, and getting it wrong produces text that reads as ungrammatical Gaelic even when every word is otherwise correct. A missing or misplaced H is the kind of error a native reader notices immediately, even if the underlying word is unambiguous from context.

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. So does how much grammatical checking the audio needs, since lenition decisions are made sentence by sentence. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

Upload is encrypted, the file goes to one named Gaelic 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.

It is normal work. Phone audio, site noise, focus groups and meetings where three people speak at once all get transcribed. What difficult audio changes is time, and occasionally certainty about a boundary or a name. We listen to a sample first and tell you straight what we expect to be able to capture, rather than handing you a file peppered with inaudible tags.