Sesotho transcription services

Sesotho has more vowel sounds than it has vowel letters — seven sounds, five letters — so e and o each cover three different pronunciations. That produces words, and even different tenses of the same verb, spelled identically despite sounding and meaning differently. A transcript that just types the standard letters preserves the ambiguity exactly as it exists in the language; resolving it, where it needs resolving, takes a linguist who can hear the difference and knows the grammar.

Whichever your project needs, agreed before we start. Lesotho's orthography sometimes uses accented vowels to separate the sounds e and o can each represent; South African Sesotho never does. If your transcript is going to a Lesotho readership or a Bible translation review, marking may be expected; for South African corporate or legal use, it would look out of place. We ask, and note the convention on delivery.

Yes, and it is documented in the academic literature on Sesotho orthography: the final vowels of Sesotho verbs in different tenses and moods can land on a letter that represents more than one sound, so two tenses come out identical on the page even though they sound different when spoken. A native transcriber resolves it the way a native reader does — from the rest of the sentence — rather than guessing.

Because resolving it requires understanding what the sentence means, not just what it sounds like. A speech-to-text model transcribes phonemes to the nearest standard letter and stops there; it has no reliable way to infer, from grammar and context, which of three vowel sounds a written e or o is standing in for on a given word. That inference is a linguistic judgement, which is exactly what a native Sesotho transcriber brings and a model does not.

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 Sesotho 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 whether the transcript follows the Lesotho or South African convention and we format it, and mark vowels, to that standard consistently.