Our reviewers know what a microárea is.
microárea: the households assigned to one community health worker under Brazil’s Family Health Strategy.
We transcribe qualitative research interviews recorded in Brazil and translate them into English, with a note wherever a word only makes sense locally, and before any audio changes hands we answer your IRB in writing.
We can start before the first interview
Audio comes late in a study, and transcription is the last thing we do for it. Most of what we can do for you starts earlier, with the budget.
A number for the budget
A budget line needs a number long before any audio exists, so we quote from the study design. While the grant is being written, fill in the sentence:
Two ethics committees, two languages
Your IRB or research ethics committee will want to know where the recordings go, which software processes them, who can open them, and when they’re deleted. We answer those questions in writing before any audio reaches us, in sentences you can paste into the application. We put an NDA in place and, for projects under the GDPR, a data processing agreement as your processor. Recordings with health information protected by HIPAA need specific written approval and a Business Associate Agreement first.
A study with participants in Brazil also goes to a CEP, one of Brazil’s local research ethics committees, and the documents it reviews are in Portuguese (how the Brazilian review works). We translate your interview guide, consent form, and participant information sheet from English into Brazilian Portuguese for that submission.
Once interviews start
Recordings come to us through a private upload link set up for your project, never as email attachments. Before the first file, we agree the conventions with you: verbatim or clean verbatim, and US or UK spelling for the English. If you’d like to see one transcript before committing the rest, we can run a pilot on a short excerpt.
The review, two turns into an interview:
Example study: primary care workforce · interview 03 · clean verbatimverbatim†
P1 = community health worker · Interviewer = study team
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.
When coding begins, the transcripts arrive as DOCX and TXT, which import into NVivo, ATLAS.ti, and MAXQDA. In the two-column version the English sits next to the Portuguese, turn by turn. If you have a Brazilian co-investigator, they can check the translation without opening a second file (bilingual or English-only translation).
If your data management plan commits you to sharing transcripts, we de-identify them on request, with codes you define. Program reports and policy documents in Portuguese can be translated too.
When the findings become a paper, the parent company can edit it: editing for scientific journals is the work Agência Rivera has done for five years, and it handles English editing and journal formatting for the article that comes out of your fieldwork.
Words our reviewers don’t have to look up
- SUS
- Sistema Único de Saúde, Brazil’s Unified Health System: public, universal, and free at the point of care.
- UBS
- Unidade Básica de Saúde, a primary care clinic in the SUS.
- posto, postinho
- What most people call the UBS in conversation. Short for posto de saúde.
- ACS
- Agente comunitário de saúde, a community health worker. Said fast, agente and a gente (“we”) sound the same.
- ESF
- Estratégia Saúde da Família, the Family Health Strategy: primary care teams, each responsible for a defined territory.
- microárea
- The households assigned to one community health worker.
- CAPS
- Centro de Atenção Psicossocial, a community mental health service.
- UPA
- Unidade de Pronto Atendimento, a 24-hour urgent care unit.
- CRAS
- Centro de Referência de Assistência Social, the local social assistance office.
- Bolsa Família
- The federal cash transfer program. The name stays in Portuguese.
- EJA
- Educação de Jovens e Adultos, schooling for young people and adults who didn’t finish it at the usual age.
- comunidade
- Often a polite word for a favela or informal settlement, and sometimes just “community.” Translated by context.
What your ethics committee will ask us
Is any AI or cloud service used? AI, yes. The first draft of the transcript comes from speech recognition with Whisper (run locally through whisper.cpp) and speaker separation with pyannote, both on our workstations in Brazil. Producing the transcript doesn’t send your audio to an outside service. A native speaker then reviews the draft, listens again wherever it reads wrong, and corrects it. For translation and the steps after it, we list the tools before the project starts, including any cloud service.
Will you sign our agreements? Yes, after reviewing them with you. An NDA is in place before we receive any file, and for projects under the GDPR, a data processing agreement in which we act as your processor. We don’t accept health information protected by HIPAA unless the project has been approved for it in writing and a Business Associate Agreement is signed before any file is sent.
Can you de-identify the transcripts? Yes, on request. Names, places, and other identifiers are replaced with codes you define, and the codes match in the Portuguese and the English.
Three of the ten questions on our data handling page, answered in the same words. The page also draws the path a recording takes, step by step.
All ten answers, ready to paste More questions from research teams