Haitian Creole transcription services

Because Haitian Creole orthography is phonemic by design: it spells what is heard, not where a word came from. English "back" enters the language as fè bak, spelled the Haitian Creole way with nothing of the English spelling surviving, standing next to the equally valid French-derived rekile. Keeping the original spelling would misrepresent how the word is actually written in Haitian Creole.

By ear, and by knowing the language's history. A native Haitian Creole transcriber recognises a borrowed word — whether obviously French or English in origin — as one they need to render in Haitian Creole's phonemic spelling rather than copy across unchanged, the same discipline they apply to any other word in the recording.

We apply the same phonemic principle that governs every other loanword, and we flag the spelling for you to confirm rather than presenting a genuinely unsettled call as fixed fact. Haitian Creole's phonemic rule is well established for words that have been in the language a while; a brand-new borrowing without a dictionary entry is where a linguist's judgement, openly stated, matters most.

Because many speech-to-text tools are built on models trained heavily on French, and they default to French spelling for words that sound French, missing that Haitian Creole would spell that same sound differently. That tendency to pull towards French spelling instead of Haitian Creole's own phonemic rules is a known weak point of automated tools working in this language.

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.

Upload is encrypted, the file goes to one named Haitian Creole 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 word 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.

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.