Thumbnail Sketch of Transcription Types

Our purpose in this section is to convey to our clients general topics concerning transcription.  Our experience has allowed us to present to you ways to understand what kind of transcription service may best serve your needs and be most cost effective.  Please be sure to check our FAQ as well as our Guidelines and Equipment pages that supply you with information that may benefit you.  We would like your input on any aspect that you feel we have not covered and would better serve our clients and help us make appropriate changes.  Please contact us.

We are prepared to encounter a variety of speech differences.  Each person has his/her own way of speaking, and conveying their thoughts about a subject manner from their own grid or frame of reference.  Words in their best order are what each of us looks to communicate, and yet the truth is, we have verbal idiosyncrasies that are less than perfect.  We find our speech littered with ‘ums’, ‘like you know,’ ‘yeah,’ etc.  This leads us into our discussion on our three types of transcript – Intelligent Verbatim, Complete Verbatim, and Edited Transcript.

Intelligent Verbatim is a transcription format, which brings forth a full and accurate transcript, but expunges all the repetitive ‘ahs,’ ‘ums,’ and verbal idiosyncrasies like excessive use of ‘kind of, ‘you know’ unless they are relevant to the content.  These fillers are considered meaningless as they hamper the flow of the message, add time to the transcription, and increase your cost considerably.  So, in order to maintain the overall style of the person speaking, we leave the unfinished sentences, contractions and even incorrect grammar such as aren't, can’t, etc, and abbreviations exactly as spoken. 

Intelligent Verbatim best addresses podcasts, webcasts, lectures, one-to-one interviews, conferences, and meetings.  Our suggestion is to consider keeping the original language for the interviewee, and allowing us to clean up the interviewer's language and summarizing the question without compromising the content of what is asked of the interviewee.  This type of transcription is the most cost effective service available.  Here is an example of fillers that stop the flow of your message:  I:  Um...um, a do you... does your mother care if you go out with your friends?  A:  Well um, cuz my mom wants to go to sleep, and you know kind of like...well there's no time for me to do.... 

Complete Verbatim is the second type of transcription used for important documentation recorded during perhaps an interview for legal purposes or for university qualitative analysis.  This is necessary for capturing the conversational 'style' of the person speaking, his/her emotions, dialect patterns, abbreviations, as well as repetitive verbal idiosyncrasies such as, 'er', 'um', 'you know', 'gotta', 'wanna', etc.  Here communicating with sentences that may have a 'false start', or a sentence with 'no ending', or one that just simply 'drifts off' with for no apparent purpose.  This also includes any opening or closing statements pertaining to the transcript.  With this in mind, it is important to understand, that this is the most expensive type of transcription service available, as it is the most time consuming to transcribe.

The third type is Edited Transcript.  This format is used for projects of conference organizers to provide a transcript for a lecturer, or perhaps a focus group capturing multiple discussions and dispense with all the enunciated idiosyncrasies of every speaker.  The cost is priced accordingly as this transcription format does not take as long as the Complete Verbatim format but does take slightly longer than the Intelligent Verbatim transcription format to complete.