The Complete Guide to Multilingual Transcription

The Multilingual Challenge

In our connected world, meetings and interviews often involve multiple languages. A business call might start in English, switch to Spanish for a side conversation, then return to English. Transcribing this accurately requires special handling.

Language Detection: Automatic vs. Manual

Modern transcription AI can automatically detect the language being spoken. This works well when:

• The entire recording is in one language
• Languages switch at clear boundaries (different speakers)
• The languages are distinct (English and Mandarin, not Spanish and Portuguese)

For mixed-language content or similar languages, specifying the primary language as a hint improves accuracy.

Code-Switching: When Languages Mix

Code-switching—alternating between languages within a conversation—is common among multilingual speakers. For example:

"The meeting was muy productivo, we finished early."

Handling this well requires:

1. A model trained on multilingual data that recognizes language boundaries
2. Context awareness to maintain coherent meaning across switches
3. Consistent formatting in the output (either translate everything or preserve original languages)

Supported Languages at Sanekot AI

We currently support 29+ languages including:

European: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish

Asian: Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian

Other: Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and more

Best Practices for Multilingual Content

1. Identify the Primary Language

Set a language hint if you know the dominant language. This helps the AI make better decisions when languages sound similar.

2. Use High-Quality Audio

Accent and pronunciation variation is higher in multilingual contexts. Clear audio helps the AI distinguish between similar sounds.

3. Review Carefully at Language Boundaries

Most errors occur where languages switch. Focus your review attention here.

4. Consider Your Audience

Will readers understand the original languages, or do you need translation? Some use cases require a single-language output.

Handling Names and Places

Proper nouns are tricky in multilingual transcription:

• Names may be pronounced differently in each language
• Places might have different official names (München/Munich)
• Organizations may have translated names

Consistent handling improves readability. Consider adding a glossary for important terms.

Translation vs. Transcription

Transcription preserves the original spoken words. Translation converts them to another language. These are different services:

• Verbatim transcription: Exact words as spoken (multilingual output)
• Translated transcription: All content in a single target language
• Hybrid approach: Transcribe first, then translate specific sections

Sanekot AI focuses on accurate transcription; translation features are on our roadmap.

Working with Interpreters

If your audio includes real-time interpretation, you'll have overlapping speech:

1. Consider transcribing only the interpreter for a cleaner document
2. Or transcribe both and use speaker labels to distinguish
3. Review carefully as simultaneous speech is harder to separate

With these strategies, you can effectively capture and work with multilingual audio content.