Audio Transcripts

After I moved home in 2008 to live with my Daddy, I did a lot of odd jobs and freelance work before I found full-time journalism work again. One of the types of work I did was transcriptions of audio files. Some of this was for my church, transcribing interviews of longtime church members for a 100th Anniversary book. Some of it was for agencies. 

Now, once again freelancing while looking for full-time work, I have also been volunteering a fair amount of time for The Skiffy and Fanty Show. I've been doing more podcasts and writing more reviews. Recently, I've also been doing transcripts for the show, starting with podcast Episode No. 762, Science Fiction Empires. 

I find this pretty enjoyable. Back then, it was all me listening and typing, sometimes at half speed, sometimes at full speed but doing a lot of pausing and rewinding. I tried doing some transcripts as a volunteer for the 2019 WorldCon Fringe Festival, but trying to transcribe panels was overwhelming, with so many people talking, sometimes cutting each other off and talking over each other, so I had to renege on my offer, sadly. (Google docs offered free transcriptions at the time, but it was horrendously bad.) 

These days, all I'm doing is downloading the MP3, uploading it into MS Word, and then proof-listening while I proofread the document. I'm not trying to fix all the grammar mistakes and run-on sentences, etc., just mainly getting everyone's names right and looking out for egregious errors -- for instance, today I changed Word's misheard "our incest" to "orange zest." Sometimes getting names or titles right does take quite a while; I once spent about 10 minutes figuring out that a garbled sentence referred to a character name, and then hunting for a review that named characters in that book, so I could get it right. But unless it's a Torture Cinema or something where people are talking over each other, I can usually proof the transcriptions at about twice speed, so it's not too time-consuming.

Sometimes I can tackle transcripts right away, but sometimes it takes me up to a week to get around to transcribing something. But a lot of people don't listen right away, either, so I figure that's OK. Once I'm finished, I upload the transcript to a folder, and Shaun amends the episode Shownotes to add my transcript.