Pashto 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 spelling follows the written standard regardless of the speaker's dialect. Your project manager confirms the format against your end use.

Because they sound completely different depending on the speaker's region. In Kandahar they keep distinct retroflex sounds; in Peshawar and Jalalabad they merge into other sounds, including one that matches a different letter entirely. Written Pashto is standardised on the Kandahar dialect, so the correct letter is not always the one that matches what a northern speaker's voice actually sounds like.

The standard spelling, applied to the word the speaker actually said. A speaker from Peshawar may pronounce ښ the same way as a completely different letter, but transcribing it as that other letter would misspell the word. A native Pashto transcriber recognises the word from context and dialect knowledge and spells it correctly, not phonetically.

Not reliably. A speech tool trained mainly on one dialect's sounds has no reason to know that a sound in another dialect corresponds to a different letter in the written standard, so it tends to spell by sound rather than by word. A native Pashto transcriber who knows both the standard and the dialect on the recording gets this right, checked by a second linguist.

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 dialect variation the audio carries, since that affects how much checking the spelling needs. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

Upload is encrypted, the file goes to one named Pashto 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 dialect form. 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, spelled to the written standard. The script 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.