Who said what, in Portuguese and in English.
We transcribe Portuguese interviews and focus groups recorded in Brazil and translate them into English. Software makes the first draft. A native speaker then goes through the draft and listens again wherever it reads wrong, correcting labels and misheard words. When a Portuguese word means more than its English equivalent, the translation gets a note.
Ask for a pilot on your own audio See what the software got wrong
Aí a gente
dá um jeito.
So we find a way.
“A gente” means “we.” Said at speed it sounds exactly like agente, her job title, and the software wrote the job title. With no article in front of it, agente can’t be right here.
Translator’s note Dar um jeito: to find a way around a problem with whatever is at hand; close to “make do” or “work something out.”
Same sound, two words. The software picked the wrong one twice.
Speech recognition (Whisper, run locally through whisper.cpp) and speaker separation (pyannote) run on our own workstations in Brazil.
Producing the transcript doesn’t send your audio to an outside transcription service or speech API.
For translation and every other step, we tell you in writing, before the project starts, which tools will touch your data. How we handle recordings
Example study: primary care workforce · interview 03 · clean verbatimverbatim†
P1 = community health worker · Interviewer = study team
No audio plays. The timeline shows where each voice falls in the excerpt.
Então, pra começar, me conta um pouco como é o seu dia a dia na unidade.
So, to start, tell me a bit about what a typical day at the clinic is like for you.
SPEAKER_00 is the interviewer. Labels follow your codebook.
Olha, eu sou
machine draft: a gentecorrected: agente comunitária há, é… há uns oito anos. De manhã eu, eu passo namachine draft: USBcorrected: UBS, pego a agenda, e aí saio pra fazer as visitas na minhamachine draft: micro áreacorrected: microárea.Well, I’ve been a community health worker for about eight years. In the morning I stop by the UBS, pick up the schedule, and then go out to do home visits in my micro-area.
She said agente, her job. And UBS is the clinic, not a USB port. Microárea is one word.
Translator’s note UBS (Unidade Básica de Saúde): a primary care clinic in the SUS, Brazil’s public health system. Micro-area: the households assigned to one community health worker.
E quantas famílias você acompanha, mais ou menos?
And roughly how many families do you look after?
Speaker change missed. The question is the interviewer’s; P1 answers from 00:00:33.
Umas… Umas cento e cinquenta. Mas tem família que é mais tranquila, e tem família que você tem que estar em cima, sabe? Idoso sozinho, gestante que ainda não começou o pré-natal…
About a hundred and fifty. But some families are easier, and some families you have to keep a close eye on, you know? Older people living alone, pregnant women who haven’t started prenatal care yet…
“Estar em cima”: flag for the translator.
Translator’s note Estar em cima (literally “be on top of”): colloquial for close, frequent follow-up, nearer to “keep checking on” than to “stay on top of.”
E as visitas, você consegue fazer todas?
And the home visits, do you manage to get to all of them?
Nem sempre, né. Aí
machine draft: agentecorrected: a gente dá um jeito. Às vezes eu volto no fim da tarde, fora do horário, porque de manhã não tem ninguém em casa.Not always. So we find a way. Sometimes I go back late in the afternoon, after hours, because in the morning nobody’s home.
Here it’s a gente, “we.” Same sound, other word.
Translator’s note Dar um jeito: to find a way around a problem with whatever is at hand; close to “make do” or “work something out.”
Labels and terms checked: six turns, two voices, one missed change of speaker, four words fixed. Over to translation.
† The draft and the pen marks are drawn to show the kind of fixes a reviewer makes. They aren’t real software output, and the interview is one we wrote.
Who we are
The pen belongs to our in-house editors and translators in Brazil. Rivera Brazil is the international service of Agência Rivera, a language company in Santa Fé do Sul, in the northwest of São Paulo state. For five years we’ve edited and translated papers for Brazilian scientific journals and their authors.
Agência Rivera is a member of ABEC, the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors, and holds an active editorial contract with Cadernos de Saúde Pública, the public health journal published by Fiocruz. When a project needs a specialist, a postgraduate consultant in the field can join the team, if you agree beforehand.
If your findings turn into a paper, the same company does English editing and journal formatting.
The Portuguese transcript and English translation we send back
Up to three files for each recording, and a short report with each delivery.
interview-03/
interview-03_pt-en.docxPortuguese and English side by side, with each translator’s note beside the line it explains. See how the Portuguese to English translation works.the two columns, in one fileinterview-03.txtPlain text that imports into NVivo, ATLAS.ti, or MAXQDA.interview-03.srtCaptions timed to the recording, for playback or for cutting clips.delivery-report.pdfWhat we processed and which conventions we used. An example report.