Swahili transcription services

By listening, not by reading. A word like "lake" can be written identically whether it is the native Swahili word or the English loanword, and only the pronunciation in the recording tells you which is meant. Industry documentation for Swahili transcription flags this exact case. A native Swahili transcriber hears the difference and represents it correctly rather than assuming one reading.

Because that is how established usage treats them. Many English loanwords are kept in their English spelling rather than being nativised to Swahili orthography — documentation for Swahili transcription gives "waste" as an example — and hybrid words exist too, with a Swahili prefix attached to an English root that keeps its English spelling. We follow that established convention rather than inventing a more "consistent" spelling that would look wrong to a Swahili reader.

Yes, when the two readings genuinely diverge, as with "lake": the native Swahili word and the English loanword are unrelated in meaning. In a business or legal transcript, mixing them up produces a sentence that reads fine but says the wrong thing. We flag any homograph like this where it could plausibly affect a translation or a decision.

Because resolving them takes knowing which language the speaker meant to use at that moment, which requires cultural and contextual judgement a model trained on text alone doesn't have. A speech-to-text system typically defaults to whichever spelling is statistically more common in its training data, which is exactly the kind of guess that gets "lake" wrong in one direction or the other.

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 Swahili 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.