Transcription Tips
Last week, I covered some tips on buying a tape or digital recorder for your intervieweing needs. So, say you do have the tape recorder and you did tape the interview and the only way you’re sure you’re going to mine that treasure trove of quotes for all it’s worth is going to be by transcribing the interview.
Let’s start with the most boring, painful way of transcribing: the old fashioned manual method of stopping and starting and rewinding. Unfortunately, I can’t find any surefire tips on how to make this less tedious. One tip is to transcribe as quickly as possible after the interview while the content and flow of the conversation are still fresh in your mind. If you have the cash, you can always buy a transcribing system so that your hands can be free while you rewind back and forth until you go insane.
However, if you don’t have time or you do have money, you can hire somebody to do it for you.
That’s pretty much as easy as finding somebody in your area via a search through the yellow pages, Google or Craig’s List or MB bulleting board postings. From what I found, many folks charge between about $15-$35 an hour, a couple dollars per page, or a flat fee (this is all based on my own research though so don’t hold me ot this). Make sure you get references and follow up. Inaccurate, slow or sloppy product isn’t worth your time or money.
There is an easier and cheaper way of doing it yourself, which might be worth the investment if you need to transcribe often, and that’s by purchasing transcription software. However, voice recognition software is not always reliable. I know a lawyer who happens to be my father who sent a memo to somebody dictated via Dragon that was supposed to say “Dear Graham,” but instead came out “Dear Grandma.” But if you are confident in the clarity if your interviews and you use a digital recorder, many digital recorders come with speech recognition software so that you might be allowed to save the digital files to your computer and then convert the speech into text, but you have to be ready to go through it and look for errors.
In the long run, many writers just avoid transcribing if possible, taking more detailed (and neater) notes and then relying on the tape recorder to solidify quotations. Some writers use shorthand to speed up the notetaking, although this seems to be going out of style (but that’s not to say that you can’t just invent your own shorthand, instead of taking the time to learn the old version.) All this saves everyone time and the embarrassment of thinking to yourself for the umpteenth time, “Do I really sound like that?”
Post update: a few recommendations on transcription softwarevia BoingBoing (via via Aaron.)
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