Top tips to get good transcriptions

As a virtual assistant, one of the services I offer is transcription. Occasionally a potential client will query the rates I charge on the grounds that it’s ‘easy enough’ to type up what someone is saying. Usually these recordings end up being the worst type to transcribe because no thought went into how they were recorded. If, however, you know that you will be paying someone to transcribe your recordings, there are several things you can do to make the recording better.

Find your transcriptionist

Firstly, if possible, find a transcriptionist before recording anything. Talk through your project with them and ask their advice. If you’re planning a big project rather than a one-off half hour interview, it is particularly important to build up a good relationship with your transcriptionist as they could make or break the project.

Choose your equipment

If you are recording spoken voices, make sure you have the right equipment for the job. Generally speaking, unless you are recording in a police station or council interview room where there are specialist tape decks, you will get a much better result by recording digitally – either straight on to a laptop or with a digital recorder. Anything involving a tape, of whatever size, will generate background noise. Worst of all is a Dictaphone – the clue is in the name, they’re designed to record one person’s dictation, not a two or three way conversation.

If you want to record straight onto your laptop, there is software available to help you do so – a quick websearch will bring up a choice of options.

Make sure you use enough microphones for the number of participants, preferably one microphone for every two participants, and make sure they’re omni-directional i.e. they pick up from all directions, not just the person who they are pointing at.

Place and test your equipment

Place your microphone(s) so that they will pick up all the voices. If it is a one-to-one interview place your microphone nearer to your interviewee – it’s no good recording your own voice and not being able to hear what your interviewee is saying. Once it’s in place test it – record some natural conversation and play it back to check that you can hear all the voices clearly. Once you are set up, don’t move the microphone, as that will only add noise onto the recording; also try and make sure that nobody rustles papers by the microphone as this will drown out the voices.

Manage your recording

If you are recording more than two people, give a brief introduction and ask each participant to introduce themselves with their name and to say a little bit about themselves. This helps the transcriptionist to identify individual voices. Then, once you begin, manage the discussion so that, as far as possible, only one person is speaking at a time. If two or more people speak at the same time, you will find that usually only the one who is loudest or closest to the microphone is audible and anything else that is said will be lost.

This really just skims the surface. You can go into more depth about microphones, recording equipment, types of sound files and other aspects, such as recording conference proceedings or phone interviews, but at least by following these tips you stand a good chance of getting a reasonable quality recording. I will just leave you with one thought – if after reading this you still don’t think it’s worth your while making the effort to get a clear recording, then bear in mind that a good transcriptionist will increase their rates for a poor recording as it takes much longer to get a good transcription from it.

Why should you record your meetings?

Do you have a dedicated minute taker when you have meetings, or does one of the participants take minutes as well as taking part in the discussion? Having a dedicated minute taker is obviously preferable, but often not feasible, especially for smaller businesses.

The alternative, taking accurate minutes when you’re also taking part in the discussion, is not easy; it usually involves long pauses while you frantically try to write everything down and limits the amount of input you can give to the meeting. You may also decide at the time that something doesn’t need to be minuted, only to find a week or so later that you wish you could remember exactly what had been said.

A very simple solution is to record the meeting. This doesn’t have to involve any specialist equipment, but can easily be achieved with a laptop running appropriate software. Alternatively, if your meeting is conducted as a conference call there is also software available for recording the call.

Once you have a recording of your meeting you can choose to have a full transcription produced of the whole meeting, or a set of summarised minutes. This can be produced in-house or outsourced to a virtual assistant or transcriptionist. Even if you don’t choose to have a word-for-word account of the meeting published, it is worth keeping the audio file as a record in case you ever need to refer back to the discussion. This is particularly true if there are likely to be any legal implications of the matters discussed.

There are various measures you can take to ensure you get a good quality audio recording. The first is to make sure that you use enough microphones to clearly pick up the voices of everyone present. If you are able to record the meeting in stereo and provide your transcriptionist with a seating plan, so much the better. A well chaired meeting usually means people talking over each other less, and simple introductions for the benefit of the tape, as well as participants, go a long way.

By recording the meeting rather than having someone take minutes, you allow all the participants to fully engage with the subject matter which will result in a more flowing discussion and be more likely to produce creative ideas and solutions. Given that it is highly likely that there will be a laptop computer present at the meeting, the question shouldn’t be why should you record your meetings, but rather why wouldn’t you?

How do you like your ums and ahs?

If you listen carefully to a general conversation between two people for any length of time you will begin to realise that there is a lot of verbal clutter in there that we automatically filter out. There will be hesitations, ‘um’s and ‘ah’s; there will be sentences that start but don’t go anywhere and there will be changes of thought mid-sentence. The same is true for most research interviews and focus groups, although obviously not necessarily for a more polished performance such as a seminar, conference or televised interview.

For this reason a good transcriptionist will ask you what sort of transcription you need if you are looking to have a spoken audio recording transcribed into the written word. There are three main kinds of transcription.

Complete verbatim

In this case the transcriptionist will write down every single thing said, exactly as it is said, all the ‘um’s, ‘er’s, ‘you know’s. When a sentence is started three times in different ways as the speaker works out what he or she wants to say, every word will make it down onto the page as will every laugh, pause and nervous giggle.

You may think this is probably the easiest way to transcribe, but it is actually the most difficult and, in terms of charges, will cost you the most. In this case the transcriptionist is working against their natural tendency to filter out all the junk which means that it is harder work and takes longer to notice every single stutter.

I have often spoken to clients who think that this is the type of transcription that they want, but to be honest, unless you are studying the particular use of language or dialect, or if you need the transcription for legal reasons, there is little benefit to it.

Intelligent verbatim

This is actually the most common type of transcription. The transcriptionist will still include any unfinished sentences or changes of thought; the use of any idioms or colloquialisms, but leave out all the hesitations and fillers such as ‘you know what I mean?’ This makes the transcription tidier and easier to read without losing the original feel of it. It also reduces the cost of transcription quite significantly.

Edited transcription

In an edited transcription the transcriptionist really tidies the work up. All repeated words and half sentences are taken out, contractions such as ‘ain’t’ are rephrased into more grammatically correct language and convoluted sentences can be shortened or broken up into different sentences to aid ease of reading.

This style is useful where a more polished transcription is required, perhaps for the purposes of publishing the proceedings of a conference or an interview or seminar.

To give you an idea of the three styles in action:

Complete verbatim: I mean, I… um, I ain’t… no, I ain’t never tried no snowboarding. I never really ‘ad the chance, did I? You know what I mean?

Intelligent verbatim: I mean I ain’t never tried no snowboarding. I never really had the chance, did I?

Edited: I’ve never tried snowboarding, I’ve never really had the chance.

If you are thinking of getting someone to transcribe an audio recording for you, it’s worth deciding exactly what sort of transcription you need before approaching anyone to do the work for you.