How to avoid mistakes in audio or video transcription
Making mistakes is a regular practice for people. Either you work at college, or do your job as a vendor. We are human beings and we can’t do our job without any flaws. However, it is necessary to understand the mistakes and prevent them.
When it comes to a transcription job, the stakes are higher. You can’t simply forget about the word in a sentence and mess up with the meaning. It is a responsible job. Making mistakes in a medical report, for example, can cost you a career, if you are a part of the Transcriberry transcribers team.
You should be good at transcribing and work with professional transcription online services for great results. However, there are still chances that you catch something wrong. Or you mess up with the writing part. What are the typical mistakes when it comes to text transcriptions? Let’s figure it out in the following points.
What mistakes to avoid when working with audio or video transcription
Either you are one of those highly-claimed certified transcriptionists, or a regular student trying to use transcription services, you can make mistakes. Here are some typical mistakes that either you or a transcription service can make.
Autocorrect
We all know how it works, yeah? You have had so many situations when the system decided on your thoughts and sent an incorrect message? You can easily miss it and let it be.
An autocorrect function can be helpful. But in most cases, it only messes up things for the transcribers. It always happens when the word from your lexicon is used very often. The system then identifies this word and replaces other seemingly-sounding words with the most frequent ones.
And it gets you in a lot of trouble. So, you have two options here. You can carefully track your writing and check if the system works fine. Or you can simply turn off this function either on your phone, laptop or tablet.
Automatic typo
This is one of the trickiest mistakes when you manage video or audio file transcription on your own. You may either have the transcribed text and want to edit it, or you cope with the transaction on your own.
Typos are not actual mistakes. There are almost no spell checkers that can fix your typo mistakes. These are incorrect words that you accidentally insert in the transcription of your file. Did you mean heart instead of heat? Were you thinking about a son but not a sun?
It is very easy to miss the mistake and let it be. In some cases, it can be the reason to have fun because it sounds weird. But sometimes such a mistake can cause major consequences. For this reason, you can’t always rely on automatic spell checkers. You should check the text on your own and look through the words.
Have you caught the message?
This is a very common mistake for video transcription practice. When listening to a video file or an audio track, you don’t get all the information at once. There is a specific background. As quite rarely you have any additional noises to interrupt the speech.
What should you do if you don’t catch what a person says? So, we should tell you that you will need patience. Sometimes, it may be enough to relisten to get the idea of the message. But it isn’t always that easy. If you try several times and can’t understand the speech, you should help yourself in another manner.
- You can try different automated online transcribers. The machines are usually bad at differentiating complex speech situations. But why not try?
- You can also ask your colleague to listen to the part of speech you can’t understand.
- Another option is to go online and look for topic-related events. Are there any additional interviews? Or maybe you can find a recording of better quality?
- You should try all these methods to figure out the message of the speaker. If you don’t get what the person is talking about, or if you don’t get the particular word, you should be inventive. When there’s no one to help you, focus on the context. You can do it in rare cases when another option isn’t available.
Listen carefully to the speech and get the idea of the message. What should the speaker say in the part that you can hardly understand? You should have some ideas. So, make up this part on your own.
Last Words
Dealing with video or audio transcription can be fun. You can find it difficult sometimes to transcribe the speech of a person or group of people. But it is a great practice. Making mistakes is also a common thing for transcription tasks.
We have listed the most frequent mistakes and ways to manage them. If you ever find yourself making a similar mistake, you now have the tips to cope with it.