Transcription vs. Copy Typing - What are They and How Do They Differ?

Transcription vs. Copy Typing - What are They and How Do They Differ?
By Anne Hickley

Many people are confused as to why transcription (audio typing) apparently costs more than copy typing, as both are typing services. This article aims to explain the differences between the two services and what makes up the costs for a transcription service.

Firstly let’s take copy typing. This normally refers to the typing of written ‘copy’ – this maybe a previously typed document (perhaps typed on a typewriter and needing to be input into a Word Processor) or a hand-written document. The cost will vary depending on the ease of readability but with basic copy typing there is no editing or interpretation required; the typist simply types what is written in front of them. The cost of the typing services will vary according to how difficult the writing is to decipher – it will be relatively cheaper if the original document is very clear handwriting or type-written.

Transcription, on the other hand, has no copy for the typist to look at, only an audio recording, which may be an audio tape, video, DVD or audio digital recording. This brings with it a number of issues that copy typing does not have: is the speech clear; is the content comprehensible (e.g. highly technical content might be full of words the transcriptionist is not familiar with); is the recording quality good (e.g. is there any background hiss on the tape or background noise from the surroundings the tape was recorded in); do you need verbatim transcription (word for word with all ‘ums and ers’, speech patterns and fillers such as ‘you know’, ‘know what I mean’ or ‘kind of’ repeated often through the recording; do you want the transcript edited to improve the grammar and sentence structure?

Clearly transcription is much more involved than copy typing. Another thing to bear in mind is that an hour of recording is not equivalent to an hour of transcription time. Even an experienced transcriptionist will be able to average four times as long for a good, clear one-to-one interview – so an hour of recording will take an average of four hours to transcribe. ( Industry standards obtained from the Industry Production Standards Guide (I998), published by OBC, Columbus, OH, USA) A group, or a poorly recorded transcript, will take commensurately longer. Thus when you receive a quote per hour of recording it may seem like a lot of money, but remember this is NOT your transcriptionist’s hourly rate but rather a quote for a minimum of four hours of her/his time.

Transcriptionists also have to make sense of what’s being said, punctuate the speech correctly and use the right homophones (words like there/their/they’re that sound the same but are spelt differently.)

Many transcriptionists specialise in a particular area so that they are familiar with the technicalities e.g. medical transcription, legal transcription. Others are more generalist and work on less technical transcripts such as research interviews and market research focus groups, video or telephone conferences, seminars and conferences. These may all, of course, contain technical data and if they do it’s helpful to provide your transcriptionist with a list of keywords or, at very least, some background information about your work. Otherwise Google is a wonderful tool if used properly to research the topic but that will add to the total time taken to produce your transcript, and therefore the cost.

Hopefully it is now clear that transcription requires more skill than ‘straightforward’ copy typing with no editing or formatting involved, and therefore commands a higher hourly rate.

There are a number of things you can do to reduce the cost of the transcription though, and these are detailed in some of my other articles. (See below).

Penguin Transcription (http://www.penguin-transcription.co.uk), part of Penguin Office Services (http://www.penguinofficeservices.co.uk), offers an affordable transcription service by tailoring each quote to the exact requirements of the client. The more information the client can provide us with, and the better the quality of the recording for transcription, the more affordable the transcription service will be. Why not visit our site and fill in an enquiry form at http://www.penguin-transcription.co.uk/PTS_enquiry_form.html to receive a quote for your transcription requirements. More information about transcription is available through other ezine articles listed at http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Anne_Hickley.

This article is copyright, Anne Hickley, 2007.

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