Korean transcription services

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. Either way the spacing follows the standard, so the two read differently but say the same thing. Your project manager confirms the choice against your end use.

Because the spacing is not in the audio. Speakers do not pause at word boundaries, so a tool has to infer every space from context, and the rules it is inferring against are unusually intricate: a peer-reviewed 2023 study of Korean error correction counted 57 spacing rules with numerous exceptions. Spacing is the single most common error native Korean writers make, and software inherits the same problem.

Yes, and the National Institute of Korean Language documents it. 수영을 못했다, written closed, means someone is no good at swimming. 수영을 못 했다, written open, means something stopped them — the Institute's own example is that the pool was shut. Identical sound, opposite fact. In a hearing or an HR investigation that space decides whether a person could not do something or was prevented from doing it.

Whichever your project needs, agreed before we start. South Korean 표준어 follows 한글 맞춤법; North Korean 문화어 follows the 조선말규범집, whose 1987 edition joins up much of what the South separates — the South writes 못 읽다, the North 못읽다. Tell us who reads the transcript and where the audio came from, and we note the standard on delivery so nobody has to guess later.

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 — spacing and terminology on dense legal material is slower than a scripted piece to camera. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

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

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. Hangul is delivered in Unicode so it displays correctly wherever it lands. Tell us what happens to the transcript after we send it and we format it for that, not for us.