East Asian language audio to text — Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese variants

The East Asian language cluster

East Asian transcription queries: "mandarin speech to text," "japanese speech text," "chinese audio to text online free," "translate italian audio to english text" (often grouped with East Asian translation searches in user behaviour). Each language has distinct challenges — tonal Mandarin, kanji/hiragana/katakana mixing in Japanese, hangul efficiency in Korean.

Mandarin speech to text

"Mandarin speech to text" — Mandarin is one of the best-supported non-English languages in modern ASR. Whisper-large achieves ~8-15% WER on clean Mandarin audio, comparable to English. Major support points:

• Whisper supports Simplified and Traditional output — set explicitly.
• Tonal accuracy is generally good; tone-confusable characters benefit from context.
• Code-switching with English (common in tech and academic contexts) is handled, though less reliably than pure Mandarin.
• Cantonese is a separate language — see East Asian dialect section.
• For "chinese audio to text online free" — Whisper self-hosted, or any SaaS free tier, with language set to Chinese.

Japanese speech to text

"Japanese speech text" — Japanese is well-supported by Whisper and Google Cloud STT. Specific challenges: kanji vs kana ambiguity (the same sound can be written multiple ways), formal vs casual register (keigo affects word choice), dialect variation (Kansai, Tohoku, Okinawan). Whisper-large at ~10-15% WER on standard Tokyo Japanese, higher for strong dialects.

For "japanese speech text" with mixed kanji+kana output (the natural way Japanese is written), Whisper produces this directly — no postprocessing needed. For furigana annotation (rare in transcription but sometimes desired), a separate NLP pass.

Korean speech to text

Korean is well-supported by Whisper-large and Google Cloud STT (~10-18% WER on clean speech). Hangul is phonetic and unambiguous, so the script-related errors common in other East Asian languages do not apply. Spoken Korean has formal/informal levels (jondaetmal vs banmal) that the model handles based on context. For "korean audio to text" the same shortlist applies — Whisper, SaaS with Korean support.

Cantonese — separate from Mandarin

Cantonese is a distinct language from Mandarin, despite sharing written Chinese characters. Whisper supports Cantonese (yue) as a separate language code. Quality is moderate (~20-30% WER) — significantly behind Mandarin because train data is much smaller. For "cantonese audio to text" — Whisper-large with language=yue, or SaaS with Cantonese support. Spot-check carefully.

Italian — bonus, often grouped with translation searches

"Translate italian audio to english text" appears alongside East Asian queries because users searching for translation often include multiple language pairs. Italian is one of the best-supported European languages (~8-12% WER), comparable to Spanish or French. Whisper translate task or two-pass transcribe-then-translate both work well.