Languages And Translation

Interviews get run in the language the candidate is most comfortable in, and then read by colleagues who may not speak it. Metaview handles both halves of that: it transcribes the call in the language actually spoken, and it can display the notes in whichever language the reader needs — so a screen conducted in Portuguese can be reviewed by a hiring manager in English without anyone re-writing it. For a team hiring across markets, that removes the usual tax on non-English interviews: no summarizing from memory into a second language, and no reason to push a candidate into English so their notes are readable.

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Two different language settings

These are easy to confuse, and they behave very differently. The short rule: fix the transcription language when the transcript is wrong, and use translation when only the reader has changed.

See the full list of supported languages

Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Mandarin, Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh.

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Translating notes for a colleague

Once your call is transcribed, you can translate your notes into any supported language, making it easy to share insights with colleagues who speak a different language, no matter the language originally spoken during the call. You can translate your Notes and TLDR summary into another language at any time. This doesn’t change the original transcript — it just updates how the notes are displayed, so you can switch back, or translate the same call differently for two different readers. Click on Translate and select a language from the dropdown to translate your notes.

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Calls with more than one language

Metaview supports multilingual transcription where multiple languages are spoken within the same call, but only for combinations of English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Italian. For any other combination, only the selected primary language is transcribed — so the parts of the conversation spoken in the other language will be missing or garbled, and your notes will be incomplete rather than obviously broken. If you know a call will switch between two languages outside that set, it’s worth checking the transcript before you rely on the notes.

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Fixing the transcription language

When Metaview picks the wrong language, the failure is rarely an error message. Watch for:

• Notes that come out empty, or with sections marked “Not discussed”
• Notes that error when loading
• A transcript that reads as nonsense, or as the wrong language entirely
• The call showing as Unavailable on your home page

Any of these usually means the audio was transcribed against the wrong language — for example, the call took place in Portuguese but Metaview transcribed it as Spanish. There are two places to fix it. From your home page. If the call is unavailable because the language was not identified correctly, click Update language, or open the call’s ⋮ (3 dots) menu and select Update language. From the transcript. If the call opened but the transcript is wrong, click the ... (3 dots) menu in the transcript panel, select Change language, and pick the correct language that was spoken during the call. When you change the language, Metaview will attempt to retranscribe your call using the selected language. This will take a few minutes to complete, and your notes are regenerated from the new transcript afterwards.

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Unsupported languages

Conversations in languages that Metaview does not support, or that have not been correctly identified, show up on your home page as unavailable. If the language is on the supported list, this is a detection problem — reset the language as above to retrigger processing. If it genuinely isn’t supported, there’s no transcript to work from; contact support if you’d like to tell us which language you need.

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Getting a cleaner transcription

The same things that make a call hard for a person to follow make it hard to transcribe, and that effect is larger in a second language:

• Ask participants to use headphones, and meet somewhere quiet where you can.
• Try not to talk over each other — overlapping speakers are the most common cause of missing words.
• Check speaker assignments after the call, so the right lines are attributed to the right person.

See Limitations to be aware of for more.