Are Your Transcripts Reading Like Gibberish or Being Transcribed Correctly?

Admittedly, I only recorded the February 13th episode of The Colbert Report because I wanted to see the segment with Dave Grohl. I was skipping through the recording last night when I couldn’t sleep (I don’t watch TV that much anymore, which is why I was viewing this episode weeks after it actually aired LOL) and of course there was the clip of poor Marc Rubio wondering why no one left a glass of water nearby for him… but in between hitting fast forward / play I caught the word “transcripts,” and I listened a moment to see what they were talking about.

Colbert mentioned something about the Spanish version appearing to be several minutes longer than the English version, and when he looked more closely at the two transcripts the Spanish version read like, to quote Colbert, “Alan Ginsburg on Peyote….,” gibberish and nonsense from beginning to end.

It seems that they were using a digital automated transcription program to transcribe the speeches and when Senator Marc Rubio did the Spanish version of the speech someone failed to switch the program from English to Spanish. Automated transcription programs create the words phonetically, which can often make for messy transcripts even when you have the correct language selected. When you have the wrong language selected and you’re talking about something like student loan debts, well you end up with a transcript that reads along the lines of, “of course the human feces predicament to we have been championed.”

Yeah. That’s awesome, right? know what’s even better than that? No one caught the mistake until after the transcripts went out and various sources started reporting about the error… meaning no one proofed them, no one bothered to look at them, they just pushed them through a pipeline of going through the motions and assuming it was fine.

Want to avoid that kind of transcription mistake happening in your business?

Get actual people to do your important transcriptions, not computer automated programs. At the very least, get real people to proofread your transcripts before you go sending them out into the public view.

Check MarkHere at the Small Business Transcriptionist your audios and videos are transcribed by real people, and after that phase they’re proofread by real people.

Before you receive the final transcript I go over it again a third time myself and double check for any errors that might have been missed in proofreading.
Our process allows for accurate transcription and a readable cleaned up final product with a nice flow.

Contact Us Today to Have Accurate Transcripts Created from Your Audio and Video Files

2 thoughts on “Are Your Transcripts Reading Like Gibberish or Being Transcribed Correctly?”

Comments are closed.