Lingala transcription services

More than most people expect. A published study of everyday Kinshasa speech found that nearly two out of every three non-Lingala words used were French, with the rest split between English, Kikongo, Kiswahili and Ciluba. A transcript of real Kinshasa audio has to treat that mixing as normal, not as an occasional foreign word to flag and move past.

We agree the convention with you before we start, because there isn't one single industry rule for it: written as French, adapted into Lingala spelling, or marked so a translator downstream knows a switch happened. What we don't do is smooth it into standard Lingala vocabulary as if the switch never occurred, which would misrepresent how the speaker actually talks.

It's more than that. A loanword is a single item that has settled into the language; what the research on Kinshasa Lingala documents is closer to code-switching — speakers moving into French vocabulary and back within the same conversation, at a scale (roughly two-thirds of non-Lingala words) that goes well beyond occasional borrowing.

Because a speech-to-text model built for Lingala is tuned to Lingala vocabulary, and one built for French expects French. Neither is designed to switch fluently between the two within a sentence, which is exactly what Kinshasa speech does. A native Lingala transcriber who is comfortable in both languages hears the switch as it happens; a single-language model tends to force everything into whichever vocabulary it knows best.

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 Lingala 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.