How to Transcribe a Recording with More Than One Language
What actually happens when a recording switches languages mid-way, why it confuses automatic transcription, and how to get a usable result anyway.
The Scriptorium team ·
Automatic transcription picks one language for the whole recording — either the one you choose, or its own best guess from roughly the first stretch of audio if you leave it on auto-detect. A recording that switches languages partway through does not make it switch with you: whichever language it settled on is what it keeps transcribing in, and the other language comes out as garbled or badly misheard text rather than being recognised correctly.
Why detection cannot switch mid-recording
Language detection happens once, early, by design — re-detecting continuously would make every short phrase in a conversation a fresh guess, which is far less reliable than committing to one answer from more context. The trade-off is exactly the failure mode described above: correct for a recording in one language throughout, and it exists because the single-language case is the overwhelming majority of real recordings.
What this looks like in practice
- A meeting that starts in English and switches to Arabic partway through comes back with the English portion transcribed correctly and the Arabic portion turned into nonsense, or vice versa.
- A recording with brief phrases in a second language — a greeting, a quoted term — usually survives fine if the surrounding language dominates; short interjections in the minority language are what the model gets wrong, not the recording as a whole.
- A recording that is evenly split between two languages is the worst case: whichever language auto-detect happened to pick from the opening seconds decides the outcome for the entire file.
What to do about it
- If you know a recording changes language at a specific point, split the audio file there and transcribe each part separately, choosing the correct language for each.
- If the switch is brief and occasional, transcribe once in the dominant language and correct the short foreign-language sections by hand — usually faster than re-processing the whole file twice.
- If you are not sure which language dominates, do not rely on auto-detect — check a minute of the recording yourself first, then set the language explicitly in video to text or audio to text rather than leaving it to guess.
This is a real limitation, not a bug to report
No automatic transcription system handles code-switching (fluent mixing of two languages within one conversation) well, because the underlying model still commits to one language per pass. Splitting the recording is not a workaround for something broken — it is how the actual constraint gets worked around, and it is the same approach any transcription tool's users end up using for genuinely mixed-language audio.