Romanian recordings and who transcribes them
Romanian is spoken in Romania and Moldova and by large communities in Italy, Spain, Germany, the UK and North America. The recordings people need as text reflect that: interviews for a dissertation, calls with a notary or an accountant back home, recordings of church services, family videos, podcasts, and meetings at companies with teams in Bucharest, Cluj or Iași.
Romanian works well with the speech model when the audio is clear, but it depends more on audio quality than the most widely covered languages do. A close microphone and a quiet room make a real difference. Plan to review names, technical terms and any passage where the speaker is far away or talking fast.
Much of this audio arrives as WhatsApp voice messages, phone call recordings or videos filmed on a phone. You can upload these files as they are, including video, without converting them first. If you have a choice, record with the phone close to the speaker and away from a running television or traffic. For a series of short voice notes, check that each one is set to Romanian before you start, since short clips give auto-detect the least to work with.
Romanian audio to text: accents and dialects
Speech from Moldova and from regions such as Banat or Maramureș has its own vowels and words. Moderate regional accents usually transcribe fine. Strong local speech, and Moldovan speech with Russian loanwords, needs more correction. Romanian from Moldova is the same written language, so keep the language set to Romanian.
Emigrants often mix in words from the country they live in: Italian in Romanian conversations in Turin, Spanish in Madrid, English in London. Single words usually come through, sometimes spelled the way they sound. Whole sentences in another language are harder, because the model is working in Romanian for that file. This page preselects Romanian so that auto-detect does not take a short clip with Italian or Spanish words for one of those languages. You can change it in the upload box.
Diacritics and the ș and ț question
The transcript is written with Romanian diacritics: ă, â, î, ș and ț. Two things are worth knowing.
- Romanian has a correct form of ș and ț with a comma below and an older form with a cedilla (ş, ţ) that looks almost the same. If your publication or institution requires the comma form, do a find-and-replace in Word after you export.
- â and î sound the same. The transcript follows the standard spelling in common words, but check proper names and rare words.
- Names, places and institutions are the most common corrections.
- Numbers and dates can appear as digits or written out.
Exports and reading Romanian in English
TXT, DOCX (Word), SRT, VTT and CSV keep all Romanian characters. The direct PDF export supports Western European characters only, and ș, ț and ă are outside it. For a Romanian transcript the PDF option opens a print-ready page, and you save it as PDF from your browser.
Use Word for interview transcripts and minutes, CSV for research coding, and SRT or VTT for Romanian subtitles on a video. Speaker labels that show who said what are available on paid plans or with a Minute Pack. For a dissertation appendix, keep timestamps on so readers can find each quote in the recording. For a letter or a report, turn them off before you export.
RocketScribe transcribes Romanian as Romanian. To read the content in English, open the Google Translate link on the transcript. For a summary in English, use the AI prompt export, which copies the transcript with a prompt you can paste into ChatGPT or Claude.