Transcription serviceArabic
Arabic Transcription Services
Arabic transcription staffed by dialect across Egypt, the Gulf, the Levant and Morocco, with a written decision about whether the transcript follows the spoken form or Modern Standard Arabic.
Free sample: Send a short Arabic audio clip and we return a transcript in the format and orthography you specify, at no cost, before you commit to a project.
Specification
- Audio
- Wideband, narrowband, mono, or separated channels
- Register
- Spoken dialect as heard, or Modern Standard Arabic as an explicitly labeled normalization
- Dialect staffing
- Egypt, Gulf, Levant and Morocco each have their own annotators and their own reviewers
- Accuracy
- Target agreed per project and measured on a held-out slice of your own recordings
- Output
- Verbatim or clean-read text, timestamps, speaker turns, code-switch marking agreed up front
Dialects and varieties covered
Egyptian Arabic, Sa'idi Arabic, Gulf Arabic, Najdi Arabic, Hejazi Arabic, Levantine Arabic, Darija.
Who does the work
- Contributor floor
- 1,000+per market
- Markets covered
- 4markets
- Dialects covered
- 7dialects
Coverage is drawn from Egypt, Gulf, Levant and Morocco, where Spirelight already publishes delivered Arabic datasets, so it is demonstrated rather than asserted.
Diglossia decides what the transcript even is
People speak dialect and write Modern Standard Arabic, and that gap is not a matter of style. A transcriber who writes a Cairo speaker's words in MSA has produced a translation. One who writes the dialect as heard has to choose spellings for words with no settled orthography, since short vowels are not written and dialect vocabulary was never standardized.
Spirelight makes that a project decision instead of an annotator decision. If you need MSA text, the scope says so and the delivery is labeled as normalized. If you need the spoken form, we agree a dialect spelling convention and hold it across batches. Where the requirement is MSA speech itself, formal and broadcast register rather than conversation, our published Arabic MSA (Modern) dataset is the more honest starting point than any dialect collection.
Four markets, four staffing pools
Moroccan Darija is not intelligible to most Egyptian listeners, and Gulf and Levantine speech differ in everyday vocabulary a transcriber cannot infer from context. Spirelight routes by the dialect in the audio: Egypt, Gulf, Levant and Morocco each keep their own annotators and their own reviewers, and a file is never sent to whoever happens to be free.
Code-switching is routine in all four and differs by market: French inside Darija, English inside Gulf and Levantine business speech, and Latin-script Arabizi in some written-adjacent material. How a switch is marked, script included, is agreed before the first file rather than settled during review.
This service is not the right fit when
- One generic Arabic transcript pooled across dialects. Name the dialects you actually recorded and they get the right speakers.
- Silent normalization of dialect speech into Modern Standard Arabic. If you want MSA text it is delivered labeled as such, never passed off as verbatim.
- Translation into English, and machine-only transcription with no human pass.
Related
Need Arabic transcription scoped to your project? Send the audio conditions, volume, and turnaround you need. We will reply with a scoped quote and, if it helps, a free sample.