When one of our clients approaches us about our Indonesian transcription service, we always need to establish exactly which Indonesian language or dialect is being spoken in the audio or video material.
Having done some research, estimates seem to differ as to exactly how many languages are spoken in Indonesia.
According to Asianinfo.org, there are 583 languages and dialects spoken in the archipelago. They normally belong to different ethnic groups of the population. Some of the distinctly different local languages are: Acehnese, Batak, Sundanese, Javanese, Sasak, Tetum of Timor, Dayak, Minahasa, Toraja, Buginese, Halmahera, Ambonese, Ceramese, and several Irianese languages. To make the picture even more colorful, these languages are also spoken in different dialects.
The University of Washington puts the number of languages spoken at “over 300”. Bahasa Indonesia is the official language of Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,508 islands that is the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, with a total population of nearly 242 million. While Bahasa Indonesia is spoken as a mother tongue by only 7% of the total population, it is the national language and is used by 200 million people as their second language. In order to facilitate communication among the Indonesian people, Bahasa Indonesia is commonly used for business and administrative purposes as well as by education institutions and mass media throughout the country.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the speech in the audio and video material we are given is Bahasa Indonesia. Our transcribers can provide a same language transcription, so any spoken Bahasa Indonesia speech to be written in Bahasa Indonesia. We can also produce a direct translation from the Indonesian speech into English if required.
Our experienced team of transcribers can provide timecode markers at any frequency required: every 5 minutes, every 1 minute, every 30 seconds, every change of speaker. We can even provide Indonesian or English subtitles in SRT format.
Learn more
If you would be interested in learning more about our Indonesian transcription service, do please get in touch and one of our project managers will be happy to help.
