Academic research
Research transcription of interviews, focus groups and oral histories, timecoded and laid out so they import cleanly into the qualitative coding software your team already uses.
Transcription Services
Clear, accurate transcripts of your recordings in 300+ languages, in the style your work needs.
Audio transcription turns a recording into a written transcript. Verbatim transcription captures every word, filler and false start; intelligent verbatim removes those and keeps what the speaker meant; edited transcription goes further and tidies the grammar. Prism Linguistics transcribes audio in more than 300 languages, with speaker labels and timecodes, and can translate the transcript into English.
A recording sitting on a drive is hard to use. A transcript is something you can work with: a researcher can code it, a solicitor can cite it, an editor can pull quotes from it. Getting the style right for that purpose is half the job.
There is no single "correct" transcript. It depends entirely on what you are going to do with it, and picking the wrong style is the most common reason a transcript gets sent back.
Two things turn a wall of text into something usable: knowing who said it, and knowing when. We label speakers throughout, and where you give us names or roles we use those rather than Speaker 1 and Speaker 2, which matters enormously when you come back to the file six months later. Two voices in a quiet room are straightforward. A focus group of eight, several of whom sound alike and talk across each other, is genuinely harder. Thirty seconds at the top of the recording where everyone states their name is the cheapest quality improvement available to anyone.
Timecoded transcription adds a time reference so any line can be traced back to the recording. We can place timecodes at fixed intervals, at every change of speaker, or only at points you nominate. Researchers coding data usually want them frequent. A solicitor citing a specific admission wants them at the moment that matters.
We would rather be honest about this than promise a number we cannot hit. Clear audio with one person speaking at a time transcribes beautifully. Some recordings do not, and no transcriber, human or machine, can recover words that were never captured.
Where a section genuinely cannot be made out, we mark it inaudible with a timecode rather than guess. A guessed word in a research transcript is worse than a gap, because the gap is visible and the guess is not. Poor audio also costs more, simply because it takes longer, so a decent recorder and a quiet room pay for themselves.
We transcribe audio in more than 300 languages, and foreign language transcription is a different job from translation. Someone has to listen to the recording in the source language and write down what was said, accurately, before anything can be translated at all. That work goes to a native speaker of the language on the recording.
From there you have three options, and clients often want the third: a transcript in the original language only, an English translation only, or both side by side so a reader can check a quotation against the source. Research teams reporting to an ethics committee or a funder almost always want both, because the original is the data and the translation is the interpretation.
Translated transcripts are produced by our translation services team, so the same standards apply: a native speaker of the target language does the work, and a second linguist reads it before delivery. Interview recordings needing Romanian translation for a housing casework file, or asylum interview audio needing Urdu translation services for a solicitor, are both regular work. If the recording is spoken evidence rather than a document, our interpreting services cover the live side.
The work is broader than most people expect, and the requirements barely overlap.
Research transcription of interviews, focus groups and oral histories, timecoded and laid out so they import cleanly into the qualitative coding software your team already uses.
Legal transcription of recorded interviews, hearings and disclosure audio, taken verbatim where the exact wording has to survive scrutiny. Also see legal translation services.
Depth interviews, IDIs and focus groups turned round quickly, with respondent labels kept consistent across a whole wave of fieldwork.
Interview transcription for editing, show notes and accessibility, handled alongside the rest of our media language services.
Clinical dictation, case notes and recorded consultations, transcribed by people used to medical terminology and handled with the care patient data requires.
Board meetings, AGMs, panel hearings and conference sessions, turned into a written record that stands up as minutes.
Recordings are often more sensitive than documents, because a voice identifies a person and people say things aloud that they would never write down. We treat them accordingly.
Only the transcriber and project manager assigned to your job can reach the files, and their access ends when the job does. Our handling is UK GDPR compliant. We will sign a non-disclosure agreement where your organisation, client or ethics committee requires one, and we are used to working inside a university's data management plan or a firm's own security schedule. If you need transcripts pseudonymised, with participant names replaced by codes, say so with the brief and we will produce them that way.
Upload the file through the quote form or ask us for a secure link for anything large. Tell us the total runtime, the language, roughly how many speakers there are, and what the transcript is for.
We recommend verbatim, intelligent verbatim or edited, confirm whether you want timecodes and speaker names, and come back with a fixed price and a date. A sample of the audio helps us quote accurately rather than defensively.
A human transcriber does the work and it is checked against the audio before delivery, with anything inaudible flagged rather than guessed. You get the transcript in Word or your preferred format, with translation alongside it if you asked for one.
We quote per recording rather than off a rate card, because an hour of audio is not a fixed amount of work. Four things move the number.
Our pricing page sets out how we price language work generally. For transcription the honest answer is that a short sample of your audio tells us more than any rate card, and the quote that follows is fixed.
This page covers audio-only recordings. If what you have is footage, our video transcription service handles the file directly and can return the transcript timecoded against the picture. If the end goal is text appearing on screen for viewers rather than a document you read, that is subtitling and closed captions, which is a different craft with its own reading-speed rules. Everything else we do is listed on the services page.
Tell us the length, the language and how many speakers. We will quote and confirm a turnaround.