Meeting minutes for mixed Hindi and English calls

In a lot of offices in India, a meeting is not in Hindi or in English. It is in both, often inside one sentence: "Client ने बोला कि launch बारह मई को ही होगा." Nobody in the room notices the switch. The trouble starts when someone has to write the minutes, and the trouble gets worse when software does it.

This post is about keeping minutes of mixed Hindi and English meetings that the people in the meeting would recognise as what they said. It covers why the common approaches lose meaning, a simple format for the minutes, and a worked sample of a transcript that keeps each word in its own script.

Three ways mixed speech gets mangled

Take that one line from a project call. Priya, the project lead, is telling the team what the client said. There are three common ways it ends up in the notes.

Romanised. "Client ne bola ki launch barah May ko hi hoga." Readable for some, but Hindi in Latin letters has no agreed spelling. Is it "barah" or "baarah", "hoga" or "hogaa"? Searching for it later is guesswork, and colleagues who read Hindi comfortably in Devanagari now have to decode it.

Translated. "The client said the launch will be on 12 May." Clean, but something is missing. "ही" in the original means "on 12 May and no earlier". It is the part of the sentence that answers the next question ("can we soft-launch on the 5th?"), and the translation dropped it. A translated note also hides whose words they were: it reads like the note-taker's summary, not Priya's sentence.

Everything in one script. Many speech recognisers pick one script per sentence. A mostly-Hindi sentence comes out as "क्लाइंट ने बोला कि लॉन्च बारह मई को ही होगा", with the English words spelled in Devanagari. It is faithful to the sound, but "लॉन्च" is not how anyone on the team would write "launch", and a search for "launch" will not find it.

All three are understandable choices. All three turn a precise sentence into an approximate one, and minutes exist for precision.

The rule: each word in the script it was spoken in

The fix is easy to state: write Hindi words in Devanagari and English words in Latin letters, as they were spoken. Don't translate, don't romanise, don't move words around.

That gives you "Client ने बोला कि launch बारह मई को ही होगा." It reads naturally to anyone on the team, it keeps the meaning, and both "launch" and "मई" are searchable as the words people actually type.

If you take minutes by hand, the rule costs nothing. Most phone keyboards switch between Hindi and English in one tap, and many people already type this way on WhatsApp.

A format for the minutes

The decisions are what people come back to minutes for, so keep them in their own section, one line each, with who decided and the time in the call. Keep the quote that settles it in the speaker's own words.

Actions get the same treatment: what, who, by when, and the line where someone took it on. Our free minutes of meeting format in Hindi has these sections, and the English version has the same layout for teams that write their minutes in English.

Why keep the original words at all, if the decision column is already in plain English? Because the decision column is someone's reading of what was said. The quote is the evidence. When the client asks "did we really say no soft launch?", the quote answers it, in the words that were used.

How Velkri handles a mixed call

Velkri takes notes on calls held in a project and on the video calls its notetaker joins. On calls held in a Velkri project, mixed Hindi and English speech is transcribed with each language in its own script, never romanised or translated.

That takes two steps. The speech recogniser hears the call. Like most recognisers, it sometimes writes English words in Devanagari when the sentence around them is in Hindi. A second pass then goes over the lines that contain Devanagari and puts each word back in the script of the language it was spoken in. The pass is not allowed to translate, add, drop or reorder words; it fixes the script, and obvious mishearings of names, and nothing else. A line it cannot make sense of stays as the recogniser wrote it.

Here is what that pass does on lines from a sample call. The left column is what a recogniser often writes; the right column is what ends up in the transcript.

And here is the transcript as the team reads it after the call, with speakers and times. Each line can be played from its moment in the recording.

A few details that matter in practice:

• Questions asked out loud get answers in the same mix. In a call, someone can say "Velkri, launch की date क्या decide हुई?" and the answer comes back in the same languages and scripts as the question.
• Names are protected. The pass knows the names of the people in the call and the terms your workspace uses. A name the recogniser mishears is put right instead of becoming a word that sounds the same.
• The app itself is in English for now. Menus and buttons are English. What people said stays in whatever mix they said it in.

As in any Velkri project, decisions and actions picked out of the call arrive as proposals. Someone on the team confirms, edits or dismisses each one, and only what is confirmed goes on the project's record, with its link back to the moment it was said.

A checklist for your next mixed meeting

1. Agree with the team that minutes keep each word in its own script. Say it once; most people are relieved.
2. Keep decisions in their own section, one line each, with the time and who decided.
3. Quote the deciding sentence as it was said. Don't tidy up the language.
4. Write the decision column in whichever language your readers search in. For most teams that is English, and that is fine, because the quote sits next to it.
5. Send the minutes the same day. Mixed-language detail fades from memory even faster than the rest.

Minutes that keep the team's own words are more useful a month later than polished ones. If you would rather not type them at all, Velkri's AI notetaker does the transcript and the first draft of the decisions. Your team does the part only people can do: confirm what was agreed.