Most people don’t talk the way they would write or in a manner in which they would like to be recorded on paper for eternity. 

A lot of speakers on teleseminars or any other type of recorded audio tend to cringe later when they hear their own recordings and note how many times they said, “But um…” or “You know…” or “So…” or just tried to fill the general airspace with sounds.

 Silence is very disconcerting to a lot of people in a situation where they’re vocally “on air” so to speak. They tend to revert to thinking out loud the same way they would if they were in normal conversation. They don’t really think of grammar and they often don’t take breaths in between sentences long enough for a transcriptionist to easily know when to start a new paragraph in the written word.  

I can count on one hand those few speakers who are comfortable with pausing between points. These speakers never lose control of their thought process and are not afraid of dead airspace.  They don’t make a lot of false starts with their sentences and then change their minds, they don’t vocalize their thoughts before they are fully formulated and they are not afraid of silence between thoughts.

As a general transcriptionist, you may be asked to transcribe teleseminars, webinars, interview, etc., where the actual transcript will form part of a package offered to members/purchasers of that particular product. You may be asked to make that transcription “product ready.” What that means is that you will be asked to transcribe the gist of the spoken word, correct obvious grammatical mistakes, nix the ums, ahs and other uglies, and produce a really excellent product that never loses the personality of the speaker.  

A tall order for a general transcriptionist? Yes, indeed.

The question is how to make rambling sound intelligent while still keeping the voice and essence of the speaker’s personality.

Here are 3 tips:

1) False Starts: When a speaker is unsure of what he/she wants to say, give them a bit of time while you are listening to the recording for them to get to the point.

A lot of people think out loud while they are formulating their thoughts. Don’t transcribe each one of their internal thoughts before they get to the point that they want to make. It adds no value to the final document to transcribe what they are thinking out loud before they actually know what they finally want to say.

Example 1 – False Starts:

 ”Well, you know, I actually think that…no, I totally believe that…actually, the importance of XYY is that it facilitates the growth of your network.”

Why not just type: “Actually, the importance of XYZ is that it facilitates the growth of your network”? 

You’re not losing any of the speaker’s personality or the gist of what he/she is saying. You’re just saving the readers a lot of words to wade through before they finally get the point.  You are also eliminating a lot of the background thought processes of the speaker that he or she is actually using to formulate their thoughts (behind the scenes) and fill dead airspace (up front).

2) Shorten paragraphs when possible: Most readers are skimming headlines, skimming bullets and skimming paragraphs so that they can grasp the essence of the piece. If you transcribe the piece in one long endless paragraph, you may lose the reader’s attention and likely won’t get it back.

Example 2  – Shorten Paragraphs

“It was of utmost importance that we made these changes. In fact, if we hadn’t made these changes, we would still be stuck with an ineffective method of dealing with our challenges and would still be in the same place as we were before. I can remember a time when this wouldn’t even have been an issue, but now I can see how important it is that we finally made these changes. As a matter of fact, just the other day I was approached by a potential client who noticed these wonderful changes we had made in our methods and let us know how happy he was and how much easier it was for him to contact us immediately. To say we were thrilled with this type of feedback would be an understatement. We are now confident that going forward, we will reap a lot of benefits simply because we have adopted the methods suggested in this software program. We highly recommend it.”

Yikes! Are you asleep yet?

This paragraph could have been transcribed in much easier digestible chunks:

“It was of utmost importance that we made these changes. In fact, if we hadn’t made these changes, we would still be stuck with an ineffective method of dealing with our challenges and would still be in the same place as we were before.

“I can remember a time when this wouldn’t even have been an issue, but now I can see how important it is that we finally made these changes. As a matter of fact, just the other day I was approached by a potential client who noticed these wonderful changes we had made in our methods and let us know how happy he was and how much easier it was for him to contact us immediately. To say we were thrilled with this type of feedback would be an understatement.

“We are now confident that going forward, we will reap a lot of benefits simply because we have adopted the methods suggested in this software program. We highly recommend it.”

Can you see the difference there?

3) Correct obvious grammatical errors – Finally, my last point is to correct obvious grammatical errors that are jarring to the reader. These include obvious errors such as “there’s’ when it should be ‘there are’, ‘their’ versus ‘they’re’ and ‘then’ versus ‘than’.

Example 3: Grammatical Errors:

Incorrect: “There’s many people who believe that they’re way is better then other people’s.”

Believe it or not, I see this all the time in transcripts.

Correct: “There are many people who believe that their way is better than other people’s.” 

As a general transcriptionist of webinars, teleseminars and other information products,  your responsibility is to keep in mind that the above three things count very much, not just to the speakers, but to their readers as well.

As always, I invite your comments and suggestions.

Until next time,

Karen

It never ceases to amaze me when I hear from folks who say they can’t find decent help online.

 When I ask what they are offering in terms of compensation, invariably they will quote some ridiculously low price… a price that no one in North America could live on, not even as a part-time supplement. They go to places like Elance and Guru and other job sites and try to find someone who will work for less than $5 per hour and then lament that “Good help is hard to find.” Excuse me?

I recently put out some feelers on Elance for my own transcription business. I offered what I felt was a decent wage. I had to cut off the bidding at more than 60 candidates, yet I have a feeling that my request could have gone on for days. Why? Because I was offering a decent wage for a newbie. I was offering a good starting wage for someone wanting to break into the general transcription business AND I was attracting the best of the best. As a side note, each of those candidates will be reviewed and responded to by the end of this weekend.

Isn’t the best of the best what you would want for your business at the end of the day? Does scrimping and saving when it comes to subcontractors really make sense in the long run?

It’s the old ‘walk a mile in my shoes’ thing. Would YOU work for you for the rates you are offering? If so, I doubt you would feel very good about yourself or the services you were offering. Are those the types of people you want on your team?

Another irony as I posted my starting subcontractor rates is that I had very few offshore candidates offering to work for me for 50, 40 or 30 cents per hour. I wonder why. Could it be because I also posted my requirements in no uncertain terms and what I absolutely needed to have at a minimum before I could even look at a person as a candidate?

Could it be apparent that I was totally clear about what my business needed and that those unqualified need not apply? Yes, I think so.

I’m putting my feet up this weekend and sifting through the serious bidders, those with real qualifications… I am going to savor them, get to know each of their personalities, and explore more about them. Would I have received the same caliber of candidates if I had offered a ridiculously low price? Of course not!

Just something to think about.

Fellow Transcribers,

Did I mention the importance of proofreading your work before you send it off to a client?

No matter how long the transcript is and no matter how careful you have been, even if it’s 50 pages…go back to the beginning and proofread your own work.

Read it objectively from start to finish, no matter how much you think you were so very careful. I know it’s boring and takes an extra five or 10 minutes, but the end product will be worth it. I guarantee that you will find at least one incident of ‘you’re’ when it should have been ‘your’, or ‘who’s’ instead of ‘whose’.

Why is this important?

With information products that are either posted on the web or sold to your customer’s clients, it’s very important. The transcript you have provided may even outlive you in terms of its longevity on the web. We all know that the search engines keep things forever!

Your client may get to the point where they themselves no longer proofread your work if it is always dead on. But what if you miss? You make your client look bad in the eyes of their clients AND you make yourself look bad in the eyes of your own client.

Consistent proofreading separates the amateur transcriptionists from the pros. A professional transcriptionist always, always proofreads their own work, no matter how confident they are that they typed the audio error-free. This includes checking website references for accuracy if you have put a live link in the transcript. Always check those URLs to make sure they work.

Believe me, by the time you have finished Page 50, you will have forgotten what was in Page 1, so you can look at it with fresh eyes when you take that extra five or 10 minutes to go over your transcript once again.

I am swamped with transcription work (I’d like to think) because I always do that final check just as a matter of course.

Because I am expanding my team, recently I posted what I think is a fair proposal on Elance to search for qualified transcriptionists. I can guarantee that the commitment to proofreading one’s work is going to be a huge factor as to whom I seriously consider. 

Just as a side note, I also need an excellent proofreader to edit my own stuff!

Karen

Unless you are a legal transcriptionist or a medical transcriptionist, chances are you are expected not to provide verbatim transcripts.

If you are a general transcriptionist, you may be assigned the task of transcribing a teleseminar, webinar or interview, for example, where the actual transcript will be provided as a paid product or offered as part of a package to a specific audience. In other words, it has to be product ready. It has to be ready to either appear in a blog for all the world to see or it has to be product ready, readable and digestible by its general audience.

As part of this, you may also be required to edit the transcript for clarity. What does ’edited for clarity’ mean? My mentor Susie Ward of The Admin Source taught me well. She taught me the following:

• Never lose the speaker’s voice or personality
• It’s okay to correct glaring grammactical errors when they appear as long as you keep the speaker’s voice
•  How to keep paragraphs shorter and how to make sure that the speaker’s points are made in a succinct and professional manner

Okay, so getting rid of those ‘ums, ahs and other uglies’; how do you do that without losing the speaker’s personality?

• Before you start transcribing, listen to the audio for a little while.  Listen to the speaker and get to know him/her a little bit better before you start to actually transcribe what they’re saying. Your ‘ear’ will eventually become attuned to that speaker’s accent and their emphasis on certain repetitive words/phrases  ( i.e. ‘you know’, ‘um ‘, ’so’, etc.)

• Leave in some of those words/phrases but not all of them. If you leave them all in, it can become distracting to the reader. If you leave none of them in, it may become too homogenized to the extent that even the speaker doesn’t recognize himself/herself.

• There is a fine balance when doing general transcription for internet-based businesses. As a top-notch general transcriptionist, your job is to capture the true essence of what that person is saying and allow his/her intelligence to shine through without the distraction of the normal filler words they may use to fill dead airspace.

The best advice I can give to any general transcriptionist who is transcribing an interview or teleseminar that perhaps may be utilized by your client for later publication on the web is first to get to know your speaker as best you can. If he/she references certain websites, author names, etc., take the time to Google those references so that those links are accurate. Never put a hyperlink in a transcript that you already haven’t checked out first to make sure it works and is active.

I am very eager to learn about two things. One, I would love to hear from general transcriptionists and your challenges with regard to editing your transcripts to a certain degree in order to make your speakers’ prose flow in a comprehensive and easily digestible manner. Two, I would love to hear from your clients themselves in terms of what they really want in terms of editing their transcripts.

Thank you!

Karen

Are you a grammar expert (or non-expert) who has some grammatical pet peeves they wouldn’t mind sharing with me?

I would truly appreciate your input, comments and suggestions because I am currently writing a transcription guidelines document for my expanding team. I will give credit to each of you in the resources section. You can contact me offline via email as to how much of your personal information you would like displayed.

For example, one of the things I hear often is, “That’s the most important thing is that you…” or “That’s what will get you far in business is doing…”

I’m no grammar wiz, but as a transcriptionist, I find myself automatically correcting those sentences to start, “The most important thing is that you…” or “What will get you far in business is…”

These are not verbatim transcripts. They are edited for grammar and readability.

If you don’t mind, I would also appreciate your feedback on what type of general reading style you have:

• Skimmer (just reads the headlines or bullets)
• Prober (drills down deep and digests every single word) 

Thanks a bunch everyone! I’m looking forward to your comments!

Karen

In an earlier post, “Hiring a New Transcriptionist 101″, I talked about the fact that you get what you pay for when it comes to transcription.

If you are looking for a top-notch transcriptionist to capture the essence of your teleseminar, webinar or online interview, you will need to consider the value of what a professional transcriptionist does:

• They research unfamiliar terms on the internet
•  They listen again and again if what you have said is inaudible or simply doesn’t make sense in terms of your overall context
• They will do their best to maintain your style of speaking, but at the same time, they will do their best to make you and your guests sound intelligent and knowledgeable. This may sometimes involve correcting one’s grammar in subtle ways.

When I first started transcribing a few years ago, my mentor was Susie Ward of  The Admin Source . Susie was a harsh mistress in that I would send her my completed transcripts and she would send them back to me with her proofread versions. Her devotion to excellence was always apparent which is why she is so successful today. She never waivered in her standards and she whipped me into shape in no time. While I don’t offer the high degree of editing and polishing that The Admin Source provides, I have everything to thank Susie for in terms of my own success today.

If all you are willing to pay to someone is $5 or $6.25 per hour (I recently saw an ad for a transcript of over 80 audio minutes where the total payment offered was $25 for the entire 80 minutes)  then you will truly get what you pay for. Considering that it takes approximately three to four hours for even the best transcriptionist  to transcribe one hour of audio, that person would be making $5 per hour for five hours of their time.  If  they could transcribe 80 minutes of audio in four hours, they would be paid $6.25 per hour. 

You may save money in the short term, but I also invite you to consider the final product.  How much of your own valuable time will it take you to proofread and amend your raw transcript to ensure that it is ready to publish?

Just something to think about.

I’d often heard that old admonition “Be careful what you wish for,” but I’d never paid much attention to it – until recently.

 When I first started Office Support 911, my virtual assistant service, back in 2006, I was pretty green about running my own business in general. I figured that I would simply hang my shingle and the customers would just start pouring in.

 That didn’t happen. The cobwebs were starting to grow around my desk (and my phone) so I did all the usual marketing things like joining my local board of trade, advertising in local newspapers, printing up business cards and social networking like crazy.

 I also used to wish that someone would just notice me and let me prove to them that I was really good at what I did. I was waiting for that big break – that one golden opportunity to break into the virtual assistant business in a big way.

 Little could I foresee that that day would eventually come.

 I had also read that most small businesses fail in the first five years due to lack of capital, lack of good management, lack of foresight and perhaps just a lack of tenacity. But I wasn’t worried about that stuff. I figured that I would just cross each bridge as I came to it.

 A very wise loved one—also a business owner—kept telling me, “Karen, if you don’t plan for expansion, your business is going to grow and you won’t be prepared to deal with it. Be careful what you wish for in terms of business success because if you don’t have the structure in place before that success hits you, you’ll be scrambling to catch up. You’ll burn out trying to do it all by yourself as one individual.”

 Luckily, I listened to him and started thinking ahead. While I had originally wished for a certain degree of success, I really hadn’t given much thought as to how I would actually execute and handle the amount of business that started coming my way.

 Some of the lessons I learned were:

• One person can only do so much in one day. Working 24/7 is a prime opportunity for you to experience burnout.
• You need to have a good work/life balance. Your ‘real’ life is just as important as your business success. We are not robots.
• Well before you hit that ‘burnout’ point, you need to start thinking about what tasks you can delegate, which means letting go of the reins a little bit.
• You also need to invest some time in training your protégés. It’s time well spent if you find the right ones.
• For a business to grow successfully, one needs to plan for the expansion that they originally wished for.

 I would love to hear more lessons learned from other small business owners. How did you deal with that business growth you had wished for?

Please feel free to share your wisdom and tips here with others!

I don’t normally promote products and/or services on my blog, but this is a new book that I am very excited about. It’s called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Web-Based Business by Steve Slaunwhite.

Many new entrepreneurs don’t know where to begin in terms of best practices in getting their business off the ground when starting an ‘online’ business versus a brick-and-mortar business.

Barnes and Noble describes this new book as follows:

“The web-based basics!

“Aspiring web entrepreneurs will find here everything they need to know about starting and running their own small-scale online business. Whether they intend to sell goods, services, subscriptions, or advertising, this book provides them with the specific nuts and bolts of planning, designing, build­ing, hosting, marketing, and operating their online businesses.”

The price is right for this new must-have book. Most major stores such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble are selling it online for under $20. The actual bookstore price will vary, depending on where you buy it. 

Check it out at Amazon at http://tinyurl.com/nl7s8o

What I also liked about this book is that Steve Slaunwhite really drilled down to the basics here. He did not talk to people as if they already had extensive internet savvy. He talked to them as if they were starting from scratch, which is what I really liked. The book is easy to understand and follow, and contains a slew of invaluable information for newbies who are just starting their internet businesses.

As the internet continues to expand, so do the opportunities for freelancers and independent contractors to savour a piece of the pie while they service the needs of businesses who conduct most of their transactions via the internet.

For example, when I first established my online virtual assistant business as Office Support 911 back in 2006, I had no idea that three years later, my online business would explode with opportunities.

 When I first started out, I was a complete unknown on the internet. I created my virtual assistance business from the ground up. At that time, I hadn’t yet realized the opportunities that lay ahead in the virtual world.

 Word-of-mouth and social networking have been my primary sources of marketing. Referrals continue to flow in as my main source of new business. “They tell two friends and they tell two friends.”

Virtual assistant services may include:

• Calendar management
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Transcription
• Proofreading
• Web design
• Graphic design
• Social marketing management
• Ghostwriting
• Marketing (cold calls)
• Website hosting
• And the list goes on…

 It truly is a freelancers’ market these days, more so than it was in the old days when companies had no other choice but to hire someone full-time or part-time to perform most of their tasks in their brick-and-mortar office. The employers would then need to pay someone for eight hours regardless of what that person did for them during those eight hours.

 Nowadays, even brick-and-mortar establishments are starting to come online and search on the internet for possible solutions for their need for assistance. They are also finding that they are being wowed by the quality of assistance they are receiving from these virtual assistants.

 Yes, the world of virtual assistance is being expanded day by day.

Before you hire a transcriptionist or transcription company, what type of transcription service do you need?

 There are basically three types of transcriptionists:

1. Medical
2. Legal
3. General

In terms of medical and legal transcription, these providers are held to high and stringent standards in terms of understanding medical and legal terms. The majority of these professionals have been accredited with degrees in their respective fields of transcription. Normally, their transcripts are absolutely verbatim for obvious reasons. These professionals also deserve the highest fees due to their specialization and training.

With general transcription, the ballpark is wide open. Making ‘product-ready’ transcripts is totally different from the straight verbatim required by medical and legal transcriptionists.

 If you are looking for a general transcriptionist, it’s not so black-and-white.  Think about: 

• What language format would you like your transcript to be in? (i.e. British or American English)
• How much do you want your final product to be edited in terms of grammar and punctuation?
• How important is it that your transcriptionist understand common internet terms?
•  How much internet research do you expect your transcriptionist to do in order to accurately transcribe your audio files?
• How much time are you willing to invest to bring your transcriptionist up to speed in terms of your goals?

‘General transcription’ is a fuzzy term that envelops pretty much everything not contained in medical or legal transcription. Often, general transcriptionists are requested to do everything from verbatim to highly-edited and proofread transcripts. Of course, the price charged will be based on how much editing and research you require from them.

If you are just looking for general transcription and visit Elance or Guru, you may be presented with prices around the $25 per audio hour mark. This is fine if you are looking for purely verbatim transcripts. At $25 per audio hour, considering it takes an average of three to four hours for even the best transcriptionist to transcribe  one hour of audio, this means the transcriber is actually receiving between $8.30 and $6.25 per hour of his/her time.  If that is okay with you, then I guess that is okay with them. But I know firsthand that  it’s not okay with most  general transcriptionists.

If your budget includes $25 per audio hour for transcription services, then you’ll pretty much get what you pay for. Expect to receive a verbatim, pretty raw transcript that may likely include every ‘um’, ‘ah’ and ‘you know’ spoken. You may also see some fairly apparent grammatical errors. If you can see them, so can your potential clients.

It may be a good idea to think about the time and cost required (if you want this to be a polished, final product) on behalf of yourself or the rest of your team in terms of refurbishing the product that you bought at such a bargain price, but then had to spend hours and hours cleaning up.

More about this topic in later posts…