Transcription · Lao
Lao transcription services
Native Lao transcribers for corporate video, eLearning, legal proceedings and more. Verbatim and clean read transcripts, time-coded and delivered to professional and legal standards. Part of a full Lao language service: transcripts, subtitles, voice over, and translation of any content you need.
About Lao transcription
Where Lao is spoken and how it is written
Lao is spoken by around 3 to 4 million people in Laos, where it is the statutory national language under the 2003 Constitution, plus a substantial number of second-language users.
The norm is set by the Educational Science Research Institute of the Ministry of Education and Sports and by the Institute of Social Sciences at the National University of Laos. The Vientiane dialect is the de facto standard; northern, Vientiane and southern varieties differ markedly in pronunciation, tone and everyday vocabulary.
At GoLocalise, we work with professional Lao transcribers who are native speakers, and we manage every step — file intake and brief, transcription, time-coding, formatting and final delivery — so the transcript you receive is accurate to the audio and ready for its intended use.
Choose your format
Three ways to transcribe the same recording
The right one depends on what the transcript is for. If you are not sure, tell us the use case and we will recommend it.
Full verbatim
Every wordCaptures every utterance, pause and non-standard pronunciation exactly as spoken, including false starts and overlap.
Best for
Legal proceedings, research interviews, compliance content
Clean read
EditedRemoves filler words, false starts and repeated phrases for readability, while keeping meaning and speaker intent intact.
Best for
Corporate video, interviews for publication, content to be translated
Summarised
Key pointsCondenses the discussion into structured key points rather than a full record of the conversation.
Best for
Executive briefings, legal summaries, research documentation
What's included
What comes with every Lao transcript
Lao, English, or both
A source transcript, an English translation, or the two side by side. The translation is produced from the original audio, not from the transcript alone.
Timecodes
Stamped at the interval you need — per speaker turn, per paragraph or at fixed intervals, matched to your edit or subtitle workflow.
Speaker identification
Every turn attributed, by name where you supply them or by role where you don't — including through overlap.
Proofreading pass
A second native Lao linguist reads the transcript against the audio before it reaches you.
Terminology kept
Legal, medical or technical vocabulary rendered to the convention your sector uses, not paraphrased.
Your format
Plain text, Word, PDF, SRT, VTT or a client-specific template — tell us the next step.
How it works
One project manager, from brief to delivery
A structured workflow, built so accuracy and confidentiality are verified at each stage rather than assumed at the end.
File intake and brief
We review your audio or video, confirm the transcript type (verbatim, clean read, time-coded), and note any terminology, speaker labels or formatting you need.
Transcriber assignment
We match your content to a native Lao transcriber with the right background, whether legal, medical, corporate or media.
Transcription and QA
The transcriber works directly from your files. A second linguist reviews the transcript against the audio for accuracy, speaker identification and consistency.
Delivery
Formatted transcripts in your chosen format, whether plain text, SRT, VTT or a client-specific template, on budget and on time.
For multi-speaker research, hearings or archive projects, we assign a coordinated team and agree milestones up front.
Who we work with
Industries that rely on Lao transcription
A written record is a compliance requirement in some sectors and an accessibility one in others. These are the Lao briefs we see most.
Legal & compliance
Hearings, depositions and arbitration, transcribed verbatim and formatted to requirement.
Automotive & electronics
Technical briefings, supplier negotiations and training material.
Broadcast & media
Interviews, documentaries and archive footage, with subtitle-ready templates.
Market research
Focus groups and interviews, including sessions with heavy speaker overlap.
Business & shared services
Client calls, process documentation and training material.
Academic & research
Lectures, field interviews and research material.
Confidentiality
Who hears your Lao audio
Lao transcription often means board material from a head office in the head office, arbitration, pre-release production audio or research interviews recorded on the understanding they stay private. So who hears it matters as much as how accurately it is captured.
Your files are uploaded through an encrypted system, handled by a named Lao transcriber under NDA, and never fed into public speech-to-text tools. We will sign your own confidentiality agreement, follow your retention rules, and delete everything on delivery if your policy requires it.
Encrypted upload
No loose files over email.
NDA as standard
Yours or ours, before we start.
No public AI tools
Your audio never trains anything.
Deletion on request
Files removed on delivery if you need it.
Lao specifics
A Lao transcript can read perfectly and still be wrong, because Lao does not write where words end
Lao is written in a continuous string of syllables. The space character is not a word divider: in Lao text it marks the end of a phrase or clause, so a file that puts a space after every word is not a cleaner transcript, it is a differently punctuated one.
Deciding where one word stops and the next begins is therefore an editorial act performed by the transcriber, using a dictionary and the sense of the sentence, not something recoverable from the audio. The same consonant-and-vowel string can be parsed into different words.
Tone, which distinguishes many of those words, is not written directly either: it falls out of consonant class, syllable type and tone mark together, so a tone mark on the page does not name one tone.
A buyer sees the consequences downstream. Word counts, search and indexing, subtitle line breaks and any alignment or concordance work all depend on segmentation choices that were made by a person, not by the recording.
Transcription rates
Professional Lao transcription
Best for clean read transcripts of corporate video, interviews and internal communications.
- Native Lao transcriber
- Verbatim or clean read
- Speaker identification
- Proofreading pass
A complete managed service for legal proceedings, multi-speaker research and longer-form content requiring verbatim, time-coded or translated deliverables.
- Everything in Standard
- Subject-specialist linguist
- Timecodes and speaker IDs
- Lao and English in one pass
Priced by runtime, audio quality, number of speakers and turnaround, and backed by our Price Match Promise. Send us a sample for an exact, no-obligation quote.
Trusted by global brands
We have used GoLocalise on a regular basis for projects in a number of languages. The service we receive is great. The team is always friendly and professional. The voiceovers we receive are of a very high quality and the turnaround is extremely quick. We are very happy to recommend GoLocalise to other businesses.
It was a pleasure to work with David and the team at GoLocalise. David gave me lots of help and advice, guiding me through my first subtitling project. He really knows his stuff! The experience was completely pain-free. I would not hesitate to recommend GoLocalise – outstanding work at a good price.
They're reliable, adaptive and obsessed with quality. And while you can never be 100% guaranteed of perfection, you can be sure GoLocalise will go the extra mile to get it right every time. We've worked with them now for over 5 years and we are truly thankful to have such a strong localisation partner for our business.
Related services
What happens after the transcript
Transcription in more languages
Native transcribers for interviews, meetings, research, media and legal material. Browse another language, or ask us about yours.
Most common questions
Why does my Lao transcript have no spaces between the words?
Because Lao is not written that way. In Lao orthography the space marks a phrase or clause boundary, not a word boundary, so inserting a space after every word produces text a Lao reader parses as broken up. If you need word-level segmentation for a search index, a translation memory or a concordance, tell us in advance: we can deliver a separately segmented version alongside the conventionally spaced transcript.
If the words are not separated, how is the transcript counted?
Lao word counts are produced by a segmenter or by the transcriber applying a dictionary, and two defensible segmentations of the same passage can differ by several per cent. We say which basis we used — character count, syllable count or a named segmentation — so that the figure can be reproduced rather than re-estimated later.
My recording is of a Lao speaker from north-east Thailand. Is that the same job?
Usually not. That variety is catalogued separately as Isan, ISO 639-3 tts, and in Thailand it is written in the Thai alphabet rather than the Lao one, even though speakers themselves often call it Lao. Tell us where the speaker is from, because it determines both the script the transcript is delivered in and which transcriber can take the file.
How will the finished Lao transcript be delivered?
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.
Is my audio kept confidential?
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.
How much does transcription cost?
Every file is quoted on its own terms. Runtime, audio quality, how many people are speaking, the turnaround you need and whether you also want a translation all move the figure, so there is no flat per-minute rate that would be honest across all of them. Send us a sample and we will come back with an exact, itemised number, backed by our Price Match Promise.
How quickly can you deliver?
Most short files come back within 24 to 48 hours. Length, audio quality and whether you need time-coding or full verbatim all affect it, and a large multi-speaker project is scheduled rather than rushed. Your project manager confirms the timeline before work starts, not after.
Ready to transcribe your Lao audio?
Send us the files and tell us where the transcript will end up — we'll come back with an exact, itemised quote.
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Transcription
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