Transcribe a khutbah or Arabic lecture

Verses and hadith are never to be trusted from the draft

Automatic transcription can drop a word, swap a similar-sounding word, add a diacritic that is not there or miss one that is. In ordinary speech that is a typo. In a verse of the Qur'an or a hadith it changes sacred text. So the rule is simple: copy every quotation of the Qur'an or the hadith from a trusted printed or official digital source and have a person with the right knowledge check it before the text is published, read out or shared.

Where Arabic recordings go wrong

• ·Classical or formal Arabic mixed with a regional dialect in the same sentence.
• ·Names, places and technical Islamic terms, which are often rendered in several spellings.
• ·Quranic recitation, which is sung or chanted rather than spoken and transcribes poorly.
• ·A big hall with echo and a speaker far from the microphone.

A workable process

1. Record from the sound system rather than the back of the room.
2. Upload the file above and set the language to Arabic instead of relying on detection.
3. Read the draft with the audio playing and correct the speaker's own words.
4. Replace every quoted verse and hadith with the text from your trusted source.
5. Have the khatib or a scholar review it before it is posted.

Permission

Ask the khatib and the mosque committee before publishing a transcript. Worshippers' voices, names and children may be in the recording. Uploading sends the audio to our server; the privacy page explains what is kept.

Drafts you review

This page is written in English, and the product itself works in Arabic: see Arabic transcription for dialects and quality, and the Arabic page تفريغ الصوت العربي. The output is a draft in every case, and no accuracy figure is offered. Without an account one file can be up to 15 minutes and 25 MB. A free account lifts those per-file limits and keeps your transcripts in a library you can search, so for a full-length recording create one instead of cutting the file up.