What is Good Transcription?
It's 'eats shoots and leaves'!
Does the company page you're looking at have one or two client testimonials? If so, look elsewhere. Good companies have more than one or two testimonials.
And do you want to spend hours of your valuable time editing a transcript which you've paid good money for? Unfortunately, it happens all too often with many, if not most, transcription'companies.
I was recently contacted by a busy client who had paid for an hour long sound file to be transcribed by a 'top UK transcription company'. The transcript required 'editing' and unfortunately, though the client had already paid a considerable sum for the transcription ( andfar more than she’d have paid for one of ours), editing a poor transcript is not an easy task. The client asked me to edit and proofread the transcript, but it was so poor it took me exactly eight and a half hours to edit. (It would, incidentally, have taken me just three hours to transcribe.) In fact, whole swathes of text were transcribed without a single comma, semi-colon or even full stop. Putting this right is a long and arduous task.
Good transcription is a skill. It not only requires very good English and grammar - not a common skill these days - but also experience, intelligence and discernment. Transcription isn't quite as straightforward as it may seem, one small but important example of which is that people don't always speak in proper sentences. They may, for instance, begin saying something and then change their minds. They may feel they're about to say too much, or that they have expressed themselves the wrong way. Therefore, mid sentence, they will change what they were originally intending or about to say. And some people, of course, simply don't finish their sentences. What do you do with that, when the client needs to know what it is they are actually saying, or not saying, what they mean or intended to say? A good transcriber has to have the intelligence, and the necessary grammar tools, to render a sentence out of what may be very difficult or even completely garbled dialogue, whilst taking into account the fact that the garbled dialogue, or mid-sentence changes of direction, may well be meaningful. Quite often, it can denote fear of speaking frankly, for example in a child protection case, or it may indicate a lack of transparency, for example in a police interview.
Below, on the left, is a typical and tortuous example of poor but so-called 'professional' transcription. Some problems have been highlighted in red. Though complete lack of punctuation cannot be highlighted, I have indicated in blue, where I can, those words that perhaps should have had, say, capital letters to denote the beginning of a new sentence, or following which there should have been some form of punctuation, or when I've wanted to highlight something that just isn't right.
On the right is how Manchester Secretarial would have transcribed the same dialogue.
Notice that the transcriber on the left, when noting ‘poor audio’, doesn’t bother to use any punctuation to separate the notation from the rest of the text, like this:
poor audio 11.56.
Nor does s/he note the audio timer correctly.
Words are clearly missing from the text which are not missing from the audio.
Perfectly common words are mispelt and sentences poorly punctuated, leaving the meaning ambiguous and the appearance completely unprofessional.
Notice also that in the last half of the interviewee’s dialogue, the interviewee speaks in what appears to be one long sentence.
People do this, but a good transcriber, nevertheless, has to make this intelligible without changing the words or the meaning. That means, somehow, breaking the text up into sentences and also paragraphs by finding natural breaks in the dialogue.
I've known some transcribers try to short-cut this by rendering the text in their own words - that's why I hand-train all my transcribers because this is only applicable in summary transcription. In intelligent verbatim transcription, the transcriber must transcribe what has been said, though not necessarily word for word, and this requires intelligence, discernment and experience.
Some words have been marked (blank) for confidentiality. The ambiguous transcription is on the left. Imagine the time it would take to correct it.