# Can a notetaker transcribe a meeting held in Mandarin and English?

> For developers, consultants and anyone whose Google Meet or Microsoft Teams calls move between Mandarin and English, from English technical terms inside Chinese sentences to a team that switches to English for one participant: what TrackHeros transcribes, how the transcript names the language, which language the notes come in, and what to check in names and figures.

Canonical: https://trackheros.com/answers/mandarin-and-english-meeting-transcription/  
Author: Sami Kanafani  
Updated: 2026-10-22

**In short:** Yes. TrackHeros notices when a Google Meet or Microsoft Teams meeting moves between Mandarin and English, transcribes the recording and renders the Chinese into English line by line, keeping each speaker and timestamp. Chinese is not one of the nine notes languages, so the notes are written in English by default, or in another of the nine if you choose one.

| Fact | Detail |
| --- | --- |
| Language setting | None needed; the mix is detected from the meeting |
| Transcript | English, line by line; the Chinese wording is stored, not shown |
| Notes language | English by default, or one of eight others; not Chinese |
| Cantonese | Recognised separately; its mix with English is not among those tested |

A meeting that moves between Mandarin and English can be transcribed by TrackHeros with nothing set beforehand. You read it as an English transcript, and the notes come out in English or another of the nine notes languages, because Chinese is not one of them. This answer is for developers, consultants and anyone else working with a team that speaks Mandarin, on Google Meet or Microsoft Teams. How the language is worked out is on [automatic language detection](/features/automatic-language-detection/), and the problem of a sentence that changes language halfway is in [when a meeting switches language mid-sentence](/blog/meeting-switches-language-mid-sentence/).

## How do Mandarin and English mix in a working meeting?

In two ways, often in the same call.

The first is inside the sentence. The sentence is Mandarin, and the technical words, product names and acronyms stay in English because that is how the team writes them in tickets and code:

| Said                                             | Roughly                                                       |
| ------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------- |
| 这个 bug 我们今天先 fix 一下，明天再 deploy。    | Let's fix this bug today and deploy tomorrow.                 |
| 下周 demo 的时候给 client 看一下新的 dashboard。 | At next week's demo, show the client the new dashboard.       |
| 预算大概五十万，但是要等 CFO approve。           | The budget is about 500,000, but it needs the CFO's approval. |

The second is by audience. A team discusses something among themselves in Mandarin for a few minutes, then turns to English for the participant who does not speak it, and back again. The transcript has to follow both: whole stretches in one language, and English words scattered through the other.

## What does TrackHeros do with a Mandarin–English meeting?

It sends it to an audio pass over the recording. Live captions on Google Meet and Teams decode one spoken language per meeting, so one of the two languages is always misread. TrackHeros notices the second language from the meeting itself and transcribes the recording with a speech model that detects the language as it goes.

Each line is then rendered into English on its own, keeping its speaker and timestamp. The transcript page names the language the way the list of recognised languages does: "Translated to English from a conversation held in Chinese and English." Speaker names come from the meeting platform, so each line carries the name a participant shows in the call; a line that cannot be attributed reads "Unknown".

Chinese mixed with English is one of the combinations TrackHeros's language handling is tested against. Cantonese has its own entry on [the languages page](/languages/) and takes the same path, but Cantonese with English is not one of the tested combinations, so no claim is made about it. No accuracy figure is published for any language.

## Which language are the notes written in?

English, unless you choose another of the nine notes languages: English, Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Ukrainian or Indonesian. Chinese is not among them. "Same as the meeting" never picks a language outside the nine, so for a Mandarin–English call it picks English only when English was clearly the main language, and otherwise leaves it to your next setting. The settings are walked through in [a meeting in a language the notes cannot be written in](/answers/meeting-in-a-language-the-notes-cannot-be-written-in/). The notes are written from the English transcript.

## What should I check in the English transcript?

Names and numbers, for reasons particular to Chinese.

- **Names heard in Mandarin.** Many Chinese syllables share a sound, so a name heard in speech can be written several ways in English letters, and the transcript may not choose the spelling the person uses. Some colleagues also go by an English name at work and a Chinese one in conversation. If the same wrong spelling keeps appearing, a vocabulary rule fixes it for the client's later meetings: see [fixing a name the transcript keeps getting wrong](/answers/fix-a-name-the-transcript-gets-wrong/).
- **Figures counted in 万 and 亿.** Chinese counts large numbers in ten-thousands (万) and hundred-millions (亿), so 五十万 is 500,000 and 三亿 is 300 million. A figure that passes through speech, translation and a summary is worth reading against the recording before it goes into a quote or an invoice.
- **Product names that are ordinary Chinese words.** A product or project with a Chinese name may be translated into English as if it were a description. An instruction rule such as "The product name 星河 is never translated" tells the transcription and translation to keep it as a name.

The transcript page names the languages it heard. If it names one nobody spoke, read [what happens when the notetaker gets the language wrong](/answers/notetaker-detects-the-wrong-language/).

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