Transcribing speech that moves between Hebrew and English

What counts as mixed Hebrew and English speech?

Linguists call it code-switching, which just means moving from one language to another during a conversation or within a single sentence. In Israel, people do it all the time. A product manager says a sprint is delayed because a deployment failed. A doctor uses the English name for a medication while explaining something in Hebrew. A student answers a question in Hebrew and drops in a term from an English textbook.

People are not being careless when they speak this way. In many fields it is simply how colleagues talk, and the English word is often the most exact term available. For a transcript, though, a single recording now has two writing systems running in opposite directions, two different sound systems, and plenty of hybrid words that do not fully belong to either language.

Why is mixed speech hard to transcribe?

Speech recognition works by scoring likely sentences against the audio. When someone speaks only Hebrew or only English, the surrounding words give the software context to pick the right match. Right where the speaker switches languages, that context drops away. The system has a fraction of a second and very little information to figure out whether a sound belongs to a Hebrew word or an English one.

Accents add to the problem. When someone says an English brand name or technical term with Hebrew vowels, it can sound more like an existing Hebrew word than the English word they meant. Short words suffer the most. A two-syllable English term tucked inside fast Hebrew speech gives the software almost no audio to work with.

Then there is the alphabet. Even if the system catches the right sound, it has to pick a script. The same word can show up in Latin letters on one line and Hebrew letters on the next, which makes the file a pain to search and edit.

How do you prepare a recording of mixed speech?

Start with mic placement. Put the microphone close to the person talking instead of leaving a phone in the middle of the table. In an echoey room, short English words are the first thing lost because they carry less acoustic weight than the Hebrew words around them. If you can, put a headset or lapel mic on each main speaker.

Have people say names and acronyms clearly the first time they come up, and spell out unusual ones once. Taking a few seconds to do this in the meeting saves several minutes of checking later. Hang on to the original audio file and do not keep converting it, since every round of compression strips out fine detail.

When you upload the file to KolWrite, pick Hebrew as the primary language if most of the talk is in Hebrew. KolWrite is built to handle mixed Hebrew and English speech. It keeps speaker labels and timestamps intact, so you can click straight to any spot where the language changes.

What about technical, medical, and legal terms?

Mixed-language transcription struggles most with specialized vocabulary. People usually say drug names, software tools, statistical methods, and legal phrases quickly in English, and those terms rarely show up in general training audio. Because of that, the software may swap in a common word that sounds similar.

Treat those specialized terms as a known risk list. Before you read through the transcript, jot down the twenty most important terms from the recording and search the text for each one, along with likely misspellings. If a term you expect to see is not there, the software probably wrote down a sound-alike word. Use the audio to check that exact spot.

For medical, legal, and financial recordings, treat the automatic transcript as a rough draft. A wrong number or drug name can change the meaning completely, so have someone who knows the subject check every critical term against the original audio.

How do you review a mixed-language transcript?

Instead of reading the transcript once from start to finish, go through it in focused passes. On the first pass, check names of people, companies, and places. On the second, check numbers, dates, and amounts. On the third, check English terms and acronyms. Looking for one type of thing at a time catches mistakes you would otherwise read right past.

If a phrase reads strangely, click the timestamp and listen to that moment. Pay special attention to the few words right before and after a language switch, since mistakes pile up at those boundaries. Speaker labels help too. When a label is wrong, it often means a sentence was missed.

Once you are done, read the whole text out loud at least once. A Hebrew sentence with an English term in it should still sound natural. Where it stumbles, a word is usually missing or misheard.

How should English words appear inside Hebrew text?

Pick one style rule and stick with it. In professional writing, standard practice is to put brand names, acronyms, and technical terms in Latin letters, and write everyday borrowed words in Hebrew letters. Consistency is what counts here, because both human readers and search tools depend on uniform spelling.

Putting English inside right-to-left Hebrew text can knock punctuation to the wrong side of a phrase. Check the end of any line that finishes with an English word, and look closely at numbers sitting next to Latin text. Clean up these layout issues in the editor before you export, since DOCX, PDF, TXT, SRT, and VTT exports keep the text exactly as it appears.