Zulu transcription services

Because Zulu's conjunctive orthography — joining prefixes, stems and suffixes into one written word — has been applied inconsistently across old and new spelling standards, and different writers place the boundary in different spots. It is a documented issue in the language, not a sign of a sloppy transcriber. What matters is that the boundaries in your transcript are checked against a standard rather than typed by habit.

Against a dictionary, not by ear alone. Zulu word division is inconsistent enough across writers that industry guidance for preparing transcription data calls for standard spelling to be checked and inconsistencies resolved as they are found, rather than left to individual habit. Our transcribers apply the same discipline: when a boundary is genuinely unclear, they check it rather than guess.

Whichever matches how your speaker actually talks. Umakhalekhukhwini is the coined, standard-Zulu term; icell is the everyday English loanword urban Zulu often uses instead. Neither is more correct in isolation — they belong to different registers — and a transcript that quietly swaps one for the other changes how the speaker comes across. Tell us the register the recording needs, formal or everyday, and we hold it consistently.

Because the ambiguity is in the language's own written conventions, not in the audio. A speech-to-text model trained mostly on one spelling convention will apply it uniformly, missing that real Zulu writing mixes old and new orthography and that even human writers disagree on where a word divides. Getting it right takes a linguist checking against a standard, which is exactly what an automated pass skips.

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 Zulu 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.

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.