Ukrainian transcription services

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, testimony and research interviews need, because every utterance is on the record. Either approach can be combined with our surzhyk handling below. Your project manager confirms the choice against your end use.

Because deciding what to do with it is an editorial judgement, not a recognition problem. A tool trained mainly on literary Ukrainian either mislabels mixed speech as errors and quietly corrects it, or fails to transcribe it consistently at all. Either way, nobody has told the software whether your project wants the mixed form preserved or normalised, because that decision has to be made by a person before transcription starts.

Yes, and the difference is not cosmetic. Speech that mixes Ukrainian and Russian — surzhyk — often signals where a speaker is from and how formal the moment is. Smoothing it into clean literary Ukrainian can make a transcript read better while quietly erasing information the recording actually carries, which matters for oral history, testimony and sociolinguistic research in particular.

Whichever your project needs, agreed before we start. Oral history, wartime testimony and linguistic research usually want the mixed speech preserved; corporate and legal transcripts destined for translation usually want it rendered in standard Ukrainian. We ask at the brief, apply the current Ukrainian orthography when normalising, and note on delivery which approach was used.

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, and so does whether the audio needs the surzhyk decision handled with care rather than transcribed on autopilot. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

Upload is encrypted, the file goes to one named Ukrainian 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 name or a word boundary. 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. Ukrainian is delivered in Unicode Cyrillic so it displays correctly wherever the file lands. Tell us what happens to the transcript after we send it and we format it for that, not for us.