Transcription
About
A transcription is a written piece of work, especially copied from one medium to another, as a typewritten version of dictation for instance. Our transcription services are mostly required to produce the transcripts from audio recordings, speeches, interviews, or videos. On top of producing the written transcript our team will also insert time stamps at regular intervals (time intervals, speaker intervals or paragraph intervals) and speaker names or labels.
Our transcriptionists are selected depending on the language required to be transcribed. We only use experts with 3-year experience as a minimum. Our transcriptionists time each chunk of text systematically against the audio or video duration for us to easily use the transcriptions for dubbing purposes if needed for instance.
Clean and True Verbatim
At Transladiem we offer two types of transcription services: clean verbatim (or tided-up transcription) and verbatim. Each has positives and negatives. The type of transcription you’ll choose depends mostly on the purpose you have for the transcribed content.
Clean Verbatim Transcript
A clean verbatim transcript is a lightly edited version of the original audio. Typically, the following elements are removed: Stutters, Filler speech, including “um,” “uh,” etc., most non-speech sounds, including coughing and throat clearing, false starts, filler words. Note that some of them can have a different function. For example, in the phrase “Oh my God”, “oh” is not a filler word, but a part of the expression, therefore it must be kept.
True Verbatim Transcript
A true verbatim transcript, on the other hand, attempts to capture every utterance of the speakers. These include stutters, meaningless filler speech, and false starts. The text is transcribed exactly as it sounds and includes all the utterances of the speakers. Those include: speech errors. “I went to the bank on Tu-Thursday.”, false starts. “I, um, wanted- I wanted to be a musician.”, filler words such as “like”, “you know”, “yeah”, “mm hmm”, “uh huh”, “umm”, “uh, um”, “sort of”, “so”, “oh” et cetera, slang words, such as gonna, wanna, gotta, kinda, ’cause, should be kept in the transcription. In addition, “you know”, “I mean” should also be transcribed, stutters and repetitions, etc. Verbatim style may also include non-speech and background sounds, such as coughing and sneezing or a door closing.
While each transcription style is useful under certain circumstances, clean verbatim is used most often because the transcripts cost less and are easier to read. However, true verbatim may be desirable for certain qualitative and market research projects and legal investigations, where it’s necessary to study not only what was said, but also the manner in which something was said.
To answer a frequently asked question, we would like to stress that usually a transcriptionist is not familiar with translation and vice versa, even if there could be exceptions. We can send out the transcripts we create for translation and will then rely on both one transcriptionist in the first place and a translator then to get the transcript localised.
