Somali transcription services

Somali is a tonal-accent language, and one of the jobs that tone does is signal case: when a noun has no article, a tonal change marks it as the subject of the sentence (nominative), and a different tonal pattern generally marks possession (genitive). It is a real grammatical distinction, on the same footing as a verb ending or a preposition, just carried by pitch instead of a written mark.

No. Somali's Latin-based script, standardised since 1972, does not represent this grammatical tone at all. So the written word alone does not always tell you which case function is intended when a name or noun appears without an article — that has to be worked out from the sentence around it, the way any native reader does.

By reading it the way a native speaker reads it: from word order and the rest of the clause, not by guessing or inventing a written workaround the language doesn't use. Where a bare noun genuinely could be read either way once the article is dropped, our transcriber and proofreader flag it rather than silently pick one reading.

Because a speech-to-text system converts sound to standard Somali spelling, and the tone that carries the grammatical information is not part of that spelling to begin with. Even a transcript that captured the pitch perfectly would have nowhere conventional to write it down. Working out the intended case from context is a linguistic step no automated transcription pass performs.

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 Somali 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.