Interview Transcription

Recorded taped interviews and transcriptions are two sides of the same coin, many believe that a transcription is a back office task, but in actual it is an effective document of authenticity, in which every spoken word of the interview is documented in precise detail.

There are two forms of transcriptions of an Interview, one which is realistic where the pauses or repetitions are included and the other where it is not, meaning the irrelevant things are edited and corrections in grammar are effectively done.

Interviews may be between a celebrity and a moderator, a policeman and a criminal, an employer and an employee, a marketing team conducting surveys over the telephone; basically it is an interaction between two or more people.

And many people would be wondering, why would anyone require a transcript of an interview, since the audio of which is already available, consider this and review the importance of a transcript. There was a police officer who was in the process of filing criminal charges against a criminal, and based on the testimony of two key witnesses, the interrogation reached a stage where the criminal had no choice but to accept to the crime he had committed, and this confession of the accused was recorded, and to give authenticity to the confession, if a transcript or a text confession signed by the criminal was not made available to the court, the entire effort of the police officer in getting the conviction in the court will not materialize.

The other instance that also will need to be mentioned here, is of a student in the process of presenting research material on Oral History, the audio interviews based on his research was of 16 hours in length, and after editing the portions not relevant to the research a transcriber could format the transcript to seven pages only, and thanks to the transcriptions, it made reading them more interesting rather than listening to them for 16 hours.

The conclusion one can draw from these two instances is never make compromises on getting transcripts of the audio recordings, you never know how important they will matter at some stage.

A spoken word is not a sparrow. Once it flies out, you can’t catch it.

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