By Vidisha Shah
Transcription - turning the spoken content of an audio or video recording into written text - is one of the most in-demand language services, and one of the least explained. This article, based on the first session of Modlingua's transcription training series, covers the fundamentals: what transcription is and the main types a language professional will encounter.
What transcription is
At its simplest, transcription means listening to the voice in a recording and writing down what was said, in the same language. In a globalized world, the job rarely stays in one language: transcription today often sits between languages, which is where it meets translation and subtitling.
Three types by language direction
- Same-language transcription: the recording and the written output share a language - for example, Hindi video with Hindi subtitles.
- Direct cross-language transcription: the captions or subtitles are produced directly in another language - a Hindi video captioned in English. This is where bilingual and trilingual professionals have the edge.
- Transcribe, then translate: captions are first created in the original language (Hindi to Hindi), then translated into any target language the client needs. This two-step route produces the most reliable multilingual subtitles.
Which of these a professional can handle depends on their language pairs - the stronger the combination with English or another lingua franca, the more work they can take on.
Two types by level of detail
- Full (verbatim) transcription: every word is captured, along with the timing of each sentence. Timings matter because captions must be fine-tuned against the audio - every subtitle you see in a video is anchored to timecodes from a full transcription.
- Intelligent (content) transcription: focuses on the critical points rather than every word and timing, giving readers a global understanding of the recording without frame-level detail.
This is only the beginning of the subject - further sessions in the series go deeper into tools and practice. Transcription and subtitling are part of Modlingua's language services alongside translation; see our quality translation services for how we handle multilingual content end to end.
