Cantonese Transcription Services

Hong Kong Cantonese.

Cantonese is spoken in one system and written in another. A Hong Kong newsreader is reading Standard Written Chinese aloud in Cantonese pronunciation; two colleagues arguing about a delivery date are using their own vocabulary, particles and sentence patterns, none of which survive being written down as Standard Chinese. A transcript of the same clip can therefore be produced two ways, and the two files differ word by word rather than in style.

Written Cantonese also needs characters that do not occur in Standard Chinese text, among them the everyday negator, the copula, the possessive particle and the perfective marker Hong Kong speakers use in almost every sentence. Whether the transcript spells those out, or substitutes a Standard Chinese equivalent nobody said, is a convention rather than a preference, and a batch that answers it one way on Monday and another on Tuesday is no longer consistent with itself. The answer goes in the style guide before production, and Hong Kong delivery is in traditional characters.

Cantonese separates six tones on the same syllable, and the contrasts are not academic. The syllable si carries poem, history, to try, time, market and to be, told apart by pitch alone. An annotator who hears the tone wrong writes a word that exists, fits the grammar and passes any spelling check, so tone accuracy here is a staffing question rather than a tooling one. The work is done by Hong Kong Cantonese speakers, and the review pass is run by people who speak the language rather than people who read it.

That same contrast is what makes romanized output worth deciding deliberately. Jyutping writes tone as a digit after the syllable, Yale uses diacritics and a silent letter, and much of what circulates informally is neither and marks no tone at all. Where a pipeline wants a romanized field for lexicon work or a pronunciation front end, the scheme is named in the scope, because batches romanized under different schemes cannot be merged.

Hong Kong speech moves into English and back inside a single clause, and that is the ordinary way people talk rather than a lapse: an English noun, verb or piece of workplace vocabulary lands in a Cantonese frame, keeps Cantonese grammar around it, and often carries a locally settled pronunciation. A transcript that quietly translates those words, or drops them for being off-language, removes what made the recording Hong Kong audio.

So the scope states what happens to them: kept in Latin script, which is the usual answer, tagged for later filtering, or normalized, which is rarely what anyone wants once they see it. Numerals, dates, place names and company names get a stated form as well. All of it is settled before the first file, and the accuracy target is checked against a slice of your own recordings the production team never sees during the run.