A multi-language phonetic transcribing system and method are provided for automatically transcribing speech into a phonetic equivalent. The phonetic transcribing system need only be able to recognize the limited number of phonemes of a particular language, e.g., the forty-two phonemes in the English language. Each language to be translated may be broken down into the phonetic elements and stored in a phonetic library for that language. The transcribing system detects speech, converts the speech to an electrical signal, and analyzes the frequency, amplitude, and timing characteristics of the speech to produce incoming phoneme information. The incoming phoneme information is compared to the phonetic elements in the active library. A correlator determines the degree of correlation between the incoming phoneme information and the stored information for each phoneme in the library. For each match, based on the degree of correlation, a respective phoneme is preferably stored and/or printed.