Turkmen transcription services

Whichever your project needs, agreed before we start. The written standard is built on the Teke dialect, but a recording from a Yomud or Ersary speaker will not always match it. For published or corporate material we generally level to the standard for readability; for evidence, interviews or archive material we keep it as spoken and note where it departs from the standard. Tell us which the transcript is for.

Because two active alphabets exist for the same language and neither is a straightforward substitute for the other. Turkmen speakers in Turkmenistan write in Latin script; those in Iran and Afghanistan write in Arabic script, Nastaliq in Iran's case. A file destined for one readership in the wrong alphabet is unusable without a further conversion step, so we confirm which one you need at the brief rather than defaulting to Turkmenistan's standard.

Not because the dialects are hard to understand — by most linguistic accounts they are close. The difficulty is a documentation one: the printed standard reflects Teke usage, so a transcriber working from Yomud or Ersary audio is making a judgement call about how closely to match that standard rather than resolving an intelligibility problem.

It changes the alphabet question and sometimes the standardisation question, so tell us at the brief. Turkmen communities in Afghanistan and Iran write in Arabic script rather than the Latin standard used in Turkmenistan, and their everyday speech is Ersary or Yomud rather than the Teke-based literary form. We assign a transcriber who works in the right script and ask how closely you want the text levelled to the standard.

Clean read suits corporate video, interviews for publication and anything heading for translation: filler words and false starts come out, meaning stays. Verbatim is what legal proceedings, compliance material and research interviews need, because every utterance and pause is on the record. Either way, the standard and script are agreed first. 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 which alphabet the transcript is delivered in and how much editorial levelling the audio needs. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

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