How to Transcribe an Interview in Another Language

"Ahorita no hay despidos."

Ana Lucía Pérez, a freelance reporter, needed to transcribe a foreign language interview with a plant manager in Monterrey. The machine translation said: "Right now there are no layoffs." She had her lead.

Then a Mexican colleague listened to the clip. In Mexican Spanish, ahorita can mean "right now" or "for the moment." With the manager's pause and his next sentence about next quarter, it read like the second. The quote wasn't wrong. It was too confident.

When you transcribe a foreign language interview, the typing is no longer the hard part. The hard part is ending up with quotes you can defend: words your source said, translated in a way they'd recognize, with a record you can show an editor.

This guide gives you a five-step workflow built on one rule, a check sheet for translated quotes, and a label you can use in print. (Ana Lucía, the plant manager, and their quotes are a composite, invented for illustration.)

The one rule: transcribe in the source language first

Translate the transcript, never the audio straight into your language.

Go straight from Spanish audio to an English transcript and you lose the words as spoken. If an editor, a lawyer, or the source asks "what did they actually say?", you need a source-language transcript with timestamps.

So you produce two documents, in this order:

1. The source-language transcript. This is your record. It stays in the language spoken, including every switch into another language.
2. A working translation. This is a reading copy. It helps you find the story, and it gets checked line by line only where you plan to quote.

Research teams work the same way. A multilingual workflow guide from GoTranscript puts it plainly: transcribe in the source language first, then translate, so you keep an auditable trail.

For the general process (correction pass, error list, storage), see our guide on how to transcribe an interview. This article covers what changes when the interview isn't in your language.

Step 1: Prepare in the interviewee's language

Most foreign-language transcription problems start before you press record.

Ask for consent in their language. The Oral History Association's Guidelines for Social Justice Oral History Work say "all documents, particularly permission forms and other key documents, should be translated into the participant's language." The same goes for a reporter's verbal ask. A "yes" to a half-understood question is a weak yes, so ask in their language and get the answer on tape.

Recording law still depends on where each of you is; our one-party consent states guide covers the US rules.

Get the spellings on tape. Ask the source to say and spell their name, title, organization, and any place names at the start. Accented names, local institutions, and acronyms are the first things AI mishears in any language.

Decide on an interpreter early. With an interpreter in the room, you record two languages. Quote the source's words, not the interpreter's summary, and ask the interpreter to translate fully rather than condense.

Agree how you'll handle the transcript. The same OHA guidelines tell interviewers to "consult with participants about translator choices and the final linguistic form(s) of the transcript." For a long-form or research interview, say who will translate and whether the source can see the transcript.

Step 2: Get the source-language transcript

With ParrotNotes, you record the interview on your phone, even with the screen locked, and the transcript is waiting when you stop. ParrotNotes Pro transcribes 99+ languages and follows a conversation that switches language partway through. For your record copy, leave the transcript language on Auto detect so the text comes back in the language spoken. For a recording you already have, share the file into the app, or use the free audio to text converter in your browser and pick the language from the list.

Code-switching: transcribe it as spoken

Many interviews mix languages. A Mexican engineer drops into English for technical terms; a Berlin startup founder says "wir müssen das scalen." Rules for the source transcript:

• Keep each word in the language it was spoken. Don't translate the English bits into Spanish, or the Spanish bits into English.
• Mark the switch where it matters. Italics or a bracket note work. Jane Nebe, a researcher on the University of Sussex's DirtPol project, sets phrases in Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin apart with italics or quotation marks, and uses footnotes "to provide literal and contextual meanings of these phrases."
• Flag slang and regional words for your checker in a comment, rather than guessing a meaning in the transcript.

Step 3: Correct the transcript with a native speaker

The correction pass is the same as for any interview: listen to the whole recording with the draft open. What changes is who listens.

If you aren't fluent, you can't catch a dropped negative or a swapped verb tense in the source language. Find someone who is: a colleague, a fixer, a stringer, or a paid transcriber. NPR's Standards & Practices team recommends another pair of ears from a staffer who speaks the language, and quotes Jonathan Kern's Sound Reporting: "you never want the translation to be at odds with the original actuality."

Give your checker a short job, not the whole hour:

• Every line you might quote, with timestamps
• Every name, number, and date
• Every passage that sounded unclear or that you flagged as slang

Agree in advance how you'll credit or pay them, and keep their name in your notes for the check sheet below.

Step 4: Translate the quotes you'll use

Translate the whole transcript for reading if it helps, but give real attention only to the lines you'll quote. For a working read, an automatic translation is fine. ParrotNotes Pro can give you the transcript in a different language from the one spoken (set your transcript language in Settings), and our walkthrough on translating audio to English covers other routes. A text translator such as DeepL or Google Translate works on the source transcript too.

For quotes, choose between two kinds of translation:

• Idiomatic: how a native English speaker would say the same thing. The Reuters Handbook of Journalism tells its reporters to translate quotes "in an idiomatic way rather than with pedantic literalness," and to make sure "the tone of the translation is equivalent to the tone of the original."
• Literal: word for word, even if it sounds stiff. The same handbook says to give a literal translation "if a statement is tendentious and likely to be the subject of close analysis." Think denials, accusations, legal statements, and anything about money or blame.

Reuters adds a third option worth taking seriously: "Avoid excessive use of direct quotes in English when a speaker has spoken in another language." When a line only works in the original, reported speech is often the honest choice.

Step 5: Check and label every translated quote

A translated quote has two chances to go wrong: the transcript and the translation. Check both, and log it.

The translated-quote check sheet

Copy this table into your notes for every story. One row per quote.

Three questions for your checker on each row:

1. Is the source-language line exactly what's on the audio?
2. Does the version you'll publish carry the same meaning and the same strength (as sure, as angry, as hedged)?
3. Would the speaker recognize it as what they said?

If the answer to any of them is "not quite," fix the translation, switch to reported speech, or drop the quote.

Tell readers it's a translation

Readers deserve to know a quote was translated. A short line does it:

• In the text: "…he said in Spanish."
• In a methods note or footnote: "Interviews were conducted in Spanish and translated by the reporter. Quotes were checked against the recordings by a native speaker."
• For research: give the original next to your translation for key passages, or in an appendix.

For the general rules on editing, trimming, and attributing quotes, see how to quote an interview.

Worked example: one word, two stories

Back to Ana Lucía (a composite). Here is her 14:32 line through each stage.

• Source transcript (Auto detect, corrected by a native speaker): "Ahorita no hay despidos. Vamos a ver cómo cierra el próximo trimestre."
• Machine translation for reading: "Right now there are no layoffs. We'll see how next quarter closes."
• Literal gloss on the check sheet: "Right now / for the moment there are no layoffs. We are going to see how the next quarter closes."
• Checker's note: with the pause and the second sentence, the manager is hedging. "No layoffs" alone overstates him.
• Published: "For now, there are no layoffs," he said in Spanish, adding that the company would see how the next quarter ended.

The first version read as a promise. The published one reports what he said, at the strength he said it. She could make that call only because she had the Spanish transcript, the timestamp, and a checker.

Keep the source-language record

When the story runs, file these together under one name, such as the date, source, and language:

• The original audio
• The source-language transcript, corrected
• The working translation, marked "reading copy"
• The check sheet, with the checker's name

If a source disputes a quote months later, the source-language transcript and the audio are what settle it. Our guide to verbatim vs clean verbatim transcription explains why a strict verbatim record is worth keeping for anything contentious.

ParrotNotes keeps each recording and its transcript together in one note, with AI semantic search across your notes on Pro, so you can find "the Monterrey interview" without remembering the file name. Pro is $19.99 a month, or $14.99 a month billed annually, with 3,000 minutes of recording a month, recordings up to 3 hours, speaker identification, and multilingual transcription with translation, on iOS, Android, and macOS. The free plan includes 100 minutes a month with an AI summary on every recording. Download ParrotNotes free and record your next interview in any language.