Transcription · Tibetan
Tibetan transcription services
Native Tibetan transcribers for corporate video, eLearning, legal proceedings and more. Verbatim and clean read transcripts, time-coded and delivered to professional and legal standards. Part of a full Tibetan language service: transcripts, subtitles, voice over, and translation of any content you need.
About Tibetan transcription
Where Tibetan is spoken and how it is written
Tibetan is spoken by around 5 million people across the Tibetic languages, in the Tibet Autonomous Region and in parts of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan, and in communities in Nepal, India and Bhutan.
There is no academy with undisputed authority. What unifies the area is the literary language rather than a spoken norm, and the regulatory framework has been described by specialists as silent on the question of diglossia.
At GoLocalise, we work with professional Tibetan transcribers who are native speakers, and we manage every step — file intake and brief, transcription, time-coding, formatting and final delivery — so the transcript you receive is accurate to the audio and ready for its intended use.
Choose your format
Three ways to transcribe the same recording
The right one depends on what the transcript is for. If you are not sure, tell us the use case and we will recommend it.
Full verbatim
Every wordCaptures every utterance, pause and non-standard pronunciation exactly as spoken, including false starts and overlap.
Best for
Legal proceedings, research interviews, compliance content
Clean read
EditedRemoves filler words, false starts and repeated phrases for readability, while keeping meaning and speaker intent intact.
Best for
Corporate video, interviews for publication, content to be translated
Summarised
Key pointsCondenses the discussion into structured key points rather than a full record of the conversation.
Best for
Executive briefings, legal summaries, research documentation
What's included
What comes with every Tibetan transcript
Tibetan, English, or both
A source transcript, an English translation, or the two side by side. The translation is produced from the original audio, not from the transcript alone.
Timecodes
Stamped at the interval you need — per speaker turn, per paragraph or at fixed intervals, matched to your edit or subtitle workflow.
Speaker identification
Every turn attributed, by name where you supply them or by role where you don't — including through overlap.
Proofreading pass
A second native Tibetan linguist reads the transcript against the audio before it reaches you.
Terminology kept
Legal, medical or technical vocabulary rendered to the convention your sector uses, not paraphrased.
Your format
Plain text, Word, PDF, SRT, VTT or a client-specific template — tell us the next step.
How it works
One project manager, from brief to delivery
A structured workflow, built so accuracy and confidentiality are verified at each stage rather than assumed at the end.
File intake and brief
We review your audio or video, confirm the transcript type (verbatim, clean read, time-coded), and note any terminology, speaker labels or formatting you need.
Transcriber assignment
We match your content to a native Tibetan transcriber with the right background, whether legal, medical, corporate or media.
Transcription and QA
The transcriber works directly from your files. A second linguist reviews the transcript against the audio for accuracy, speaker identification and consistency.
Delivery
Formatted transcripts in your chosen format, whether plain text, SRT, VTT or a client-specific template, on budget and on time.
For multi-speaker research, hearings or archive projects, we assign a coordinated team and agree milestones up front.
Who we work with
Industries that rely on Tibetan transcription
A written record is a compliance requirement in some sectors and an accessibility one in others. These are the Tibetan briefs we see most.
Legal & compliance
Hearings, depositions and arbitration, transcribed verbatim and formatted to requirement.
Automotive & electronics
Technical briefings, supplier negotiations and training material.
Broadcast & media
Interviews, documentaries and archive footage, with subtitle-ready templates.
Market research
Focus groups and interviews, including sessions with heavy speaker overlap.
Business & shared services
Client calls, process documentation and training material.
Academic & research
Lectures, field interviews and research material.
Confidentiality
Who hears your Tibetan audio
Tibetan transcription often means board material from a head office in the head office, arbitration, pre-release production audio or research interviews recorded on the understanding they stay private. So who hears it matters as much as how accurately it is captured.
Your files are uploaded through an encrypted system, handled by a named Tibetan transcriber under NDA, and never fed into public speech-to-text tools. We will sign your own confidentiality agreement, follow your retention rules, and delete everything on delivery if your policy requires it.
Encrypted upload
No loose files over email.
NDA as standard
Yours or ours, before we start.
No public AI tools
Your audio never trains anything.
Deletion on request
Files removed on delivery if you need it.
Tibetan specifics
A Tibetan transcript can read perfectly and still be wrong, because it is written in literary Tibetan and nobody in the recording was speaking literary Tibetan
Tibetan is diglossic. The written language is a conservative literary register whose spelling records Old Tibetan consonant clusters that modern speech no longer pronounces, so the word for Tibet is spelled bod and said [pʰø̀ʔ].
Writing down what a speaker said therefore means choosing a register — the demotic phal skad, the deferential zhe sa, the literary yig skad or the religious chos skad — and the easy default is to smooth speech into the literary form, which quietly deletes the honorifics that showed who was deferring to whom and the egophoric and evidential verb endings that showed whether the speaker knew something first-hand or inferred it.
The same literary surface also conceals which language was actually recorded. Amdo and Khams are catalogued as separate ISO 639-3 languages, `adx` and `khg`, and Amdo speakers are reported to switch to Chinese to communicate with Central Tibetans although they use the same literary language.
A finished transcript in classical orthography looks identical whichever of those the audio contained, which is precisely the problem when the transcript is evidence, research data or a translation source.
Transcription rates
Professional Tibetan transcription
Best for clean read transcripts of corporate video, interviews and internal communications.
- Native Tibetan transcriber
- Verbatim or clean read
- Speaker identification
- Proofreading pass
A complete managed service for legal proceedings, multi-speaker research and longer-form content requiring verbatim, time-coded or translated deliverables.
- Everything in Standard
- Subject-specialist linguist
- Timecodes and speaker IDs
- Tibetan and English in one pass
Priced by runtime, audio quality, number of speakers and turnaround, and backed by our Price Match Promise. Send us a sample for an exact, no-obligation quote.
Trusted by global brands
We have used GoLocalise on a regular basis for projects in a number of languages. The service we receive is great. The team is always friendly and professional. The voiceovers we receive are of a very high quality and the turnaround is extremely quick. We are very happy to recommend GoLocalise to other businesses.
It was a pleasure to work with David and the team at GoLocalise. David gave me lots of help and advice, guiding me through my first subtitling project. He really knows his stuff! The experience was completely pain-free. I would not hesitate to recommend GoLocalise – outstanding work at a good price.
They're reliable, adaptive and obsessed with quality. And while you can never be 100% guaranteed of perfection, you can be sure GoLocalise will go the extra mile to get it right every time. We've worked with them now for over 5 years and we are truly thankful to have such a strong localisation partner for our business.
Related services
What happens after the transcript
Transcription in more languages
Native transcribers for interviews, meetings, research, media and legal material. Browse another language, or ask us about yours.
Most common questions
My file is labelled "Tibetan". Is that enough to start?
No. Amdo and Khams are catalogued as separate languages, adx and khg, and Amdo is reported not to be mutually intelligible with Lhasa Tibetan at even a basic level, to the point that speakers sometimes fall back on Chinese to communicate. All three are written with the same script and much the same literary standard, so the label tells us nothing about who can transcribe the file.
Should the transcript be in literary Tibetan or in the spoken form?
That is your decision and it should be taken before we start. Literary Tibetan is what most Tibetan readers expect on a page, but it is a different register from speech and rendering speech into it involves rewriting. If the transcript is evidence, interview data or a source for translation, ask for the spoken form to be preserved, and expect the result to look less polished.
What is actually lost if the speech is tidied into the written standard?
Two things a reader cannot recover afterwards. Honorific register — Tibetan has a deferential vocabulary, zhe sa, alongside the demotic phal skad, and it records the social relation between the people in the room. And the egophoric and evidential verb endings, which mark whether the speaker is reporting first-hand knowledge or something inferred or heard.
How will the finished Tibetan transcript be delivered?
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.
Is my audio kept confidential?
Yes. Files are uploaded through an encrypted system, handled by a named transcriber under NDA, and never fed into public speech-to-text tools. We can sign your own confidentiality agreement, work to your retention rules and delete everything on delivery.
How much does transcription cost?
Every file is quoted on its own terms. Runtime, audio quality, how many people are speaking, the turnaround you need and whether you also want a translation all move the figure, so there is no flat per-minute rate that would be honest across all of them. Send us a sample and we will come back with an exact, itemised number, backed by our Price Match Promise.
How quickly can you deliver?
Most short files come back within 24 to 48 hours. Length, audio quality and whether you need time-coding or full verbatim all affect it, and a large multi-speaker project is scheduled rather than rushed. Your project manager confirms the timeline before work starts, not after.
Ready to transcribe your Tibetan audio?
Send us the files and tell us where the transcript will end up — we'll come back with an exact, itemised quote.
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