Transcription serviceTurkish
Turkish Transcription Services
Turkish transcription where a single spoken word can carry an entire clause, so the scoring unit, the loanword conventions and the dialect assignment are all settled before the first file is processed.
Free sample: Send a short Turkish 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
- Scoring unit
- Word, character or morpheme, agreed up front, because one Turkish word can hold a whole clause
- Orthography
- Dotted and dotless i held apart end to end, and loanword spelling fixed in the style guide
- 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
- Review
- Second-pass review on a sampled percentage, rate agreed up front
Dialects and varieties covered
Istanbul Turkish, Anatolian.
Who does the work
- Contributor floor
- 1,000+per market
- Markets covered
- Turkey
- Dialects covered
- 2dialects
Coverage is drawn from Turkey, where Spirelight already publishes a delivered Turkish dataset, so it is demonstrated rather than asserted.
One word can be a whole clause, which is why word error rate misleads here
Turkish is agglutinative. Suffixes stack onto a stem until one written word carries tense, person, negation, possession, question and the speaker's evidence for the claim, all at once. Mishear a single suffix on a long form and the whole token is wrong, so a word-level error rate scores it exactly as it would score a dropped article in English, while the meaning that moved is far larger.
It runs the other way too. A correct stem with one suffix out of place fails as a token even though most of the string is right, which makes Turkish look worse against an English benchmark than it is. Spirelight agrees the scoring unit in the scope, word or character or morpheme, so the figure you receive describes what actually went wrong instead of an artifact of how Turkish is written.
Loanwords are where the spelling rules run out
Turkish orthography is close to phonemic, which makes native words straightforward to write and imported ones a decision. Borrowed words often sit outside vowel harmony, arrive with more than one accepted spelling, and are pronounced anywhere from fully nativized to fully foreign, so two competent transcribers will write the same brand name or technical term two different ways in the same batch.
The dotted and dotless i are the other recurring source of silent damage. They are separate letters with separate meanings, and text that has passed through a careless keyboard, an autocorrect, or a lowercasing step loses the distinction with nothing visible to show for it. Spirelight fixes loanword spelling in the style guide and checks both letters in review rather than assuming the pipeline preserved them.
Dialect and language switching are assigned, not averaged
Audio recorded in the east and southeast carries vocabulary and reduced suffix forms an Istanbul annotator will guess at, and it regularly includes Kurdish, which is a separate language rather than a variety of Turkish. Transcribing through a switch, or treating it as noise, removes precisely the material a code-switching model needs to learn from.
Spirelight assigns annotators by what is actually in the recording and agrees how a language switch is marked before work begins, so batch one and batch nine follow the same rule rather than each annotator's instinct.
This service is not the right fit when
- Kurdish audio filed as Turkish. It is a separate language with its own annotators and its own scope.
- Ottoman Turkish in Arabic script, or other historical material. Spirelight staffs modern Turkish speech.
- Machine-only transcription with no human pass. Spirelight does not sell raw ASR output.
- Translation into or out of Turkish. Transcription is same-language.
Related
Need Turkish 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.