Galician transcription services

The official one — the Normas ortográficas e morfolóxicas of the Real Academia Galega and the Instituto da Lingua Galega, in the 2003 consensus version — unless you tell us otherwise. It is what the Xunta, councils, the parliament, the public broadcaster and public universities require. If your project is deliberately reintegrationist, say so at the brief and we will write to that system instead.

It is the position that Galician belongs to the Galician-Portuguese system and should be spelled accordingly, with forms like -çom, nh and lh. It is not wrong and it is not illegal; it is a long-standing tradition with its own publications and readership. It is simply not the official orthography, and a document in it will not be accepted by a Galician public body as it stands. The two systems should never be mixed in one transcript.

By default, what was said, with each switch marked — that is what a faithful record needs, and Galician is spoken in a thoroughly bilingual society, so switching is normal. If the transcript is a step towards publication or translation, we can render the Spanish stretches into Galician, and we label that as an edited text rather than a transcript. We agree it at the brief.

Because they are the rule most often broken under Spanish influence. The Normas require a, con, de and en to fuse with the article — ao or ó, á, co, coa, do, da, no, na — and a transcriber with Castilian reflexes writes them apart. It is a small, visible error that tells an institutional reader the document was not produced by someone who writes Galician regularly.

No. A Portuguese speaker will follow a good deal of the audio and produce Portuguese spelling, which is the reintegrationist problem in another form; a Spanish speaker will produce Castilian reflexes throughout. Written Galician in the official norm is its own competence. We assign native Galician transcribers.

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.

Coverage of Galician in automated systems is thin, and what exists tends to drift into Spanish or Portuguese on anything ambiguous, mishandle contractions, and ignore the switching entirely. The correction pass to bring it to the official norm ends up longer than transcribing natively.

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.

Word, PDF, plain text, Excel or a subtitle-ready file, with 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.