What Is Multilingual Transcription?

Direct definition

Multilingual transcription produces text for speech in more than one language — either one file per language, a language-id plus recognition pipeline, or a single transcript that follows code-switching.

The sections below explain how multilingual transcription is used in transcription and subtitle work, what people often mix up, and which VideoText workflow applies when the next step is a file or review pass.

Key takeaways

• Recognizing Spanish audio is not the same as translating an English SRT into Spanish.
• Code-switching inside one conversation is harder than a single-language file.
• Recognizing speech in another language is not the same job as translating existing subtitle cues.

Multilingual transcription vs subtitle translation

Transcription starts from audio. Translation starts from existing text cues and should preserve timecodes.

Related terms

• localization
• transcription
• automatic speech recognition
• All glossary terms

Sources

1. Mozilla: Common Voice multilingual dataset