Urdu transcription services

Urdish is the everyday mixing of Urdu and English that happens constantly in business, media and ordinary conversation. For a transcriber it raises a real question with no external answer: does an English word inside an Urdu sentence get written in Urdu script or left in Latin letters? Both are common practice, so an unbriefed transcript can use both within the same document.

We agree the convention at the brief, and name the terms it applies to — brand names, technical vocabulary, job titles, whatever your recordings run into. A native Urdu transcriber applies the same call to every new term across the project, so a word written one way in file one is not written a different way in file twelve.

Not reliably. Speech recognition trained on one language expects a consistent script, and Urdish supplies neither: the same English word can surface in Urdu script in one sentence and Latin letters in the next, with no rule a model can learn from a few examples. A native Urdu transcriber makes the call term by term and keeps it consistent across the file.

Because Urdu readers do not read it that way. Names and terms Urdu speakers have long since adopted into everyday speech read naturally in Urdu script, while others stay recognisably English. Defaulting one way or the other produces a transcript that reads oddly to a native speaker, which is why the call is made term by term rather than by a blanket rule.

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 how much editorial decision the audio demands — settling code-switching conventions on a dense legal file is slower than a scripted piece to camera. Every quote carries our Price Match Promise.

Upload is encrypted, the file goes to one named Urdu 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, tribunal recordings, 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 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. Urdu script is delivered in Unicode so it displays correctly wherever it lands, and the agreed code-switching convention travels with the file as a short note for whoever picks it up next.