10 Facts Everyone Should Know About Oral History Interviews

From BlokCity

Transcription is essentially defined as any typing of oral recordings (intelligent verbatim transcription) - currently on a digital recorder, often supplied by a company called Olympus and recorded onto a CD or digital file.

The file is then sent to a transcriber (typist) who uses software to turn the recorded work in to a manuscript. This really is the transcript and therefore we get the word transcription.

There are two kinds of outsourced transcription work, the first being day to day, general dictation by managers, fee earners and professionals and these often be mainly letters, memos and reports. You can find big enterprises in the UK as well as the USA that outsource the typing work to call centre operations in India and South Africa. These operations may be running many hundreds of thousands of recordings at any one time and the turnaround rate is generally within hours.

The expense of outsourcing day to day transcription work is normally great as well as can safe companies considerably, though not as one much as one would expect. Firstly, a secretary on site can often be handling numerous different things at any one time, including inquiries, telephone calls and some junior fee earning managerial tasks. A secretary offshore in India can simply type a letter.

After the transcription has been done, the local operative must vet each bit of work as overseas transcription historically has a very poor record of accuracy. There was up until recently a company in the UK advertising this service with illustrations of transcription on their own website showing bad spelling mistakes. I trialled the service myself for one of my clients which is quite apparent that although it is cheaper, the transcription contains a whole lot more grammatical errors, geographical & name errors and typing mistakes, as they are not completed by a native English speaker.

The other sort of transcription will be the longer recordings of interviews, reports, consultations and conferences.

These tend to be bulk orders and also will be a range of tapes, CDs or digital files recorded of discussions, meetings or simple one to one interviews - the transcription is simply a Full Article record of the recording.

Court transcription services are a good example of this, although most courts have their very own select number of transcribers who will simply do court work and nothing else on a set contract with their machinery in the courtrooms.

The next type of recording (ie: conferences and meetings) tends to be very time intensive, and often companies & organisations will look to outsource this to ensure that they can free up staff internally to handle other work.

The best example of this is solicitors firms where a police station interview needs transcribing; often a secretary might have to do it. However a secretary transcribing a 30 minute police station interview requires about four hours of time. Four hours of a secretary's day could be very costly to a solicitor in the event the secretary can also be taking telephone calls, general typing and admin work.

Another example will be a business who had an employment tribunal hearing and need a recording of a disciplinary meeting transcribing. The expense of transcribing a disciplinary meeting again may be measured with regard to the time it might take someone from a department to sit down and type out the whole meeting. It means that for every 20 minutes of recording, somebody has got to sit for probably in the region of approximately three hours to transcribe. Three hours of somebody's time for you to do this really is often too costly for the company and usually somebody volunteers to do it, realises how hard the work is within about five minutes and says they won't do it with the work being outsourced at that stage!

Those are the factors why transcription is now so popular to be outsourced - it frees up staff time and gets rid of a very unpopular task that can be turned around quickly and effectively offsite by experienced transcribers.