Do you want to have an audio file manually transcribed? You will be offered a choice between full verbatim or clean read transcription. What results can you expect per transcription type? And what guidelines do Amberscript’s transcribers follow?
This guide will also assist you in deciding which form of transcription best suits your needs and will shed some light on the transcription guidelines followed by the transcribers.
Clean read and full verbatim: Distinctions
Clean read (default): Goal – capture what has been said. End result: Grammatically correct transcript, with the good reading flow.
Examples: Organization/company meetings, municipality meetings, presentations, etc.
Full verbatim: Goal – capture how something has been said. End result: Precise transcript, as close to audio as possible.
Examples: Research interviews like patient-doctor conversations, speech analysis, legal documents like court hearings, focus group interviews where the emotions of the interviewee play an important role, etc.
English transcription guidelines in a nutshell:
- Clean read transcriptions do not include: Speech errors, false starts, repetitions, slang words, stutters, filler words, etc.
- In full verbatim transcriptions, the text is transcribed exactly as it sounds including speech errors, false starts, filler words, slang words, repetitions, and stutters.
- The numbers zero up to and including nine are written out (i.e. one, three, nine)
- The number 10 and above are written in digits (10, 11, etc.)
- If a number is at the start of a new sentence, it is written out fully.
- Times and dates are written as digits.
Punctuation guidelines to be followed:
| . | Full stop/period | Every sentence ends with a full stop. |
| ? | Question mark | Do questions end with a question mark? |
| ! | Exclamation mark | Use an exclamation mark for emphasis! |
| , | Comma | Commas are used for short pauses, lists, and to improve reading flow. |
| … | Ellipsis | If there is a pause … use ellipsis to indicate it. |
| – | Single dash | U-use a single dash to indicate word interruptions and for hyphenations such as color-coded. |
| — | Double dash | Use a double dash to mark incomplete sentences and– |
| “” | Quotation marks | “I’m a punctuation enthusiast!” she exclaimed. |
Transcription tags used:
The following tags are included in a transcription when they are relevant for the transcription or context.
| Full Verbatim | Clean Read | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Non-speech sounds like Mm-hmm or Uh-huh (affirmative) | Mm-hmm | Yes | Yes | |
| Audio file is impossible to understand after listening three times, at high volume and lower speed (0.7) | [inaudible 00:00:00- 00:00:00] | Yes | Yes | |
| Filler words like um, uh, er and ah | [uh] | Yes | No | |
| Music is played loudly and clearly – if relevant to context | [music] | Yes | No | |
| Video is played | |video| | Yes | No | |
| Continuous laughter for several seconds | [laughter] | Yes | No | |
| Continuous coughing for several seconds | [coughing] | Yes | No | |
| Long period of silence (3 seconds or longer) | [silence 00:00:00- 00:00:00] | Yes | No | |
| If relevant to transcription/context | [crying] | Yes | No | |
| If relevant to transcription/context | [yelling] | Yes | No | |
| Audience applauds speaker | [applause] | Yes | No | |
| When multiple people are speaking over each other causes any one of the speakers to become inaudible | [crosstalk 00:00:00- 00:00:00] | Yes | Yes | |
| When the audio includes non-English parts | [foreign language 00:00:00- 00:00:00] | Yes | Yes |
