Hebrew transcription services

Ktiv male is the plene spelling standard the Academy of the Hebrew Language sets for unpointed text — text written without niqud, which is how almost everything is written. It decides which consonantal letters mark a vowel that would otherwise only appear as a dot. Applied inconsistently, the same word can be spelled two different ways in one document, which breaks search and looks careless.

No. The audio is identical either way — nobody pronounces the extra letter. Ktiv male and the shorter ktiv haser are both ways of writing the same spoken word; the difference is purely which consonantal letters stand in for its vowels on the page. A transcript follows the current Academy standard regardless of which way a particular speaker or an older document might have written it.

The Academy of the Hebrew Language, Israel's official authority on the language. Its current ktiv male rules date from 2017, replacing the standard the Va'ad HaLashon set around 1948. Because the rules have moved, an older reference document and a transcript delivered today can legitimately spell the same word differently, and we flag that rather than let it read as an error.

Not reliably. Getting ktiv male right means applying a rule set correctly across an entire document, not just guessing a plausible spelling for each word in isolation, and consistency across hundreds of instances is exactly where automated output tends to drift. A native Hebrew transcriber applies the current standard throughout, and a second linguist checks the whole file for it.

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 editorial decision the audio demands — a legal file dense with names and terms needs closer spelling consistency checks than a scripted piece to camera. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

Upload is encrypted, the file goes to one named Hebrew 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, boardroom recordings, focus groups and meetings where three people speak at once all get transcribed. What difficult audio changes is time, and occasionally certainty about a name or a boundary. 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. Hebrew is delivered in Unicode so it displays correctly wherever it lands, spelled to the current Academy standard and checked for consistency across the whole document.