From a Mandarin focus group to an English working transcript in minutes. From a Spanish source interview to a publishable English quote, side by side with the original line for verification. The bilingual workflow that researchers and journalists actually need — not a generic transcription tool with translation bolted on.
Most transcription products were built for English-speaking customers transcribing English meetings. Translation, when it exists, is bolted on as a separate billable service, a captioning feature for video creators, or a pooled credit that punishes anyone who translates everything. But a multilingual interview workflow needs three things in sequence — accurate source-language transcription so the original quote is defensible, fluent translation so a non-source-speaking team can analyze, and bilingual side-by-side display so any quote can be verified against the original line. The 'three icebergs' qualitative methods review explicitly warns against analyzing only translated transcripts. Veteran journalists prescribe the same: a quoted translation must be exact, not a paraphrase. Vocova ships the workflow both groups have been stitching together.
100+ source languages, 140+ translation pairs, diarization that holds up on focus groups and panels.
Your interview is transcribed in the language it was spoken in. The original transcript is the citation; the translation is the analysis. Researchers cite back to the source line for member-checking and IRB audit; journalists verify a quote before it goes to print.
Toggle a view that shows source language and your working language line by line. Verify a translated quote against the original in one click. The verification UI Bearak prescribed for journalists working with interpreters — and the cross-check Lingard et al. recommend for cross-language qualitative analysis.
Try bilingual subtitlesSpeaker labels for 5+ person focus groups, dyadic interviews, press conferences, and panel discussions. Rename Speaker 1 to a real participant pseudonym once and the change applies throughout. Each segment timestamped for jump-to-source playback during quote verification.
Translate Tigrinya to French, Cantonese to Portuguese, Mandarin to English, Spanish to German. Not just the global top-10. Otter caps at 4 transcription languages with no real translation. Rev's subtitles cover 17 languages. Vocova spans the long tail because real research and real cross-border journalism happen in it.
See translation toolsDOCX for NVivo, ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, and Dedoose imports — with consistent speaker labels NVivo's auto-coding works on. SRT and VTT for video pieces. PDF for archive and IRB submission. Plain TXT and CSV for downstream scripts and spreadsheets.
Same three steps whether you're a researcher running a 90-minute focus group or a journalist with a deadline tomorrow.
Drop a 90-minute interview file, or paste a supported link from YouTube, X, or Vimeo when you have permission to process it. 100+ source languages auto-detected. No fixed length cap on long-form.
Speaker-labeled, timestamped, in the language the interview was recorded in. Rename Speaker 1 once and the label propagates through the whole transcript. The source-language artifact stays as evidence; you decide when to translate.
One click to translate into any of 140+ target language pairs. Read source and working language side by side, jump back to the audio at any timestamp to verify a quote, edit anything that needs polish, then export to DOCX for CAQDAS, SRT or VTT for video, PDF for archive.
Export as DOCX with consistent speaker labels (Speaker 1, then renamed). NVivo's auto-coding features work best on this format; ATLAS.ti, MAXQDA, and Dedoose all import DOCX (and TXT, RTF, PDF). Vocova does not produce a native QDPX exchange file — neither does any other transcription vendor — but DOCX with clean speaker labels is the standard bridge.
Most qualitative methodologists recommend citing the original-language quote with a parallel English gloss for non-source-speaking readers. The 'three icebergs' review by Lingard, Schumann and colleagues explicitly cautions against analyzing translated transcripts in isolation. Vocova preserves both transcripts so you have the citation-grade source line and the analysis-grade English next to each other.
Diarization handles multiple speakers across languages. Mid-sentence code-switching is a known weak point for every automated transcription tool — the qualitative methods literature has called this out for years. For heavily code-switched audio (Spanglish, Singlish, Hinglish, diaspora interviews) we recommend the bilingual review pass plus a human verification step before publication. We won't oversell what AI can do here.
Be cautious. Whisper, the underlying model many transcription tools use, has been documented to hallucinate around 1.4% of segments — and 38% of those hallucinations carry explicit harms including fabricated names. The bilingual side-by-side view and timestamp-jump are designed for the verification step Bearak prescribed: 'if you're going to put something in quotation marks, it has to be an exact translation, and not a paraphrase.' Always verify the original-language line against the audio before publication.
Yes, when the source is supported, reachable, and you have permission to process it. Vocova supports 1,000+ URL sources, including examples such as YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, X, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Bilibili, and SoundCloud. If a public link is blocked or not reachable, upload your own saved file instead.
The source-language transcript and the translation typically complete in minutes — not the four-to-six hours per audio hour the manual process used to take. For a tight newsroom deadline, you can have a diarized bilingual transcript ready before the next editorial meeting. For research, the time you save goes back into reflection and analysis instead of typing.
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30 minutes of transcription on us — translation included. Source language transcript stays preserved alongside your working language. No credit card, no sales call.