Samoan transcription services

Because Samoan respect vocabulary swaps the whole word depending on who is being addressed, not just how politely it is phrased. The general word is 'sau'; addressing a chief or a professional it becomes 'afio mai' or 'susū mai'; addressing an orator it is 'maliu mai'. A single conversation involving speakers of different rank can correctly use two or three of these, and each one has to be transcribed as the word actually used.

By tracking who is speaking to whom throughout the recording, the same information a Samoan listener uses. The rank of the person being addressed is not marked on the word itself, so the transcriber follows the conversation's structure — who is a chief, a pastor, an orator, or none of these — rather than defaulting to the most common form.

Not reliably. A speech-to-text model trained on general usage tends to default to the everyday word, so a recording with a chief or an orator present can come back missing the respect vocabulary the speaker actually used. We use native transcribers who recognise these words as distinct terms, not as casual variants of each other.

No — it is a separate feature from the everyday choice between more careful and more relaxed pronunciation. Respect vocabulary is a fixed set of words tied to specific social roles, used regardless of how formally or casually the rest of the sentence is spoken, so the two decisions are made independently.

Clean read suits corporate video, interviews for publication and anything heading for translation: filler words and false starts come out, meaning and respect vocabulary stay. Verbatim is what legal proceedings, compliance material and research interviews need, because every utterance and pause is on the record. Your project manager confirms the choice against your end use.

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 respect vocabulary the audio carries, since recordings involving chiefs or church settings take more editorial attention. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

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