Transcribing Oral History For Knowing The Past

Legal transcription has become popular in the recent years and so is oral history transcription. Oral history is a systematic collection of living people’s testimony about their own experience. Oral history depends upon the human memory and spoken words and the historians attempt to verify their findings and place them in an accurate history context. In oral history transcription, an interviewee recalls an event for an interviewer who records the recollection and creates a historical record.

Processing of Transcribing

Transcripts are written or digital documents of the oral history interview. Transcribing oral history is a form of archival practice with the aim of creating and maintaining documents for future generation of scholar and researchers. Each every word spoken by the person will be transcribed including all errors, grammatical mistakes and false starts. In the case of Oral History Report the audio files are also given along with the final report for any clarifications. The transcription process can take 4- 6 hrs for transcribing an interview.

Writing a Transcript

A transcript should be in a standard form which includes the following contents:

>> Name of the interviewee and contact information including

>> Interviewer’s name, affiliation and contact details

>> Date of interview

>> Location of the interview

>> List of acronyms

Skilled transcriptionists listen to the audio file and type the exact word said by the speaker. Each pause and inflections by the speaker is indicated by punctuation and the changes in topics in indicated by separation of paragraphs. Filler words such as uh, um etc should be omitted.

Transcript Editing

Editing of transcripts is a critical task. It undergoes three phased process to ensure that every word transcribed is accurate and error free.

+ First phase

The transcript goes through the first phase in which the documents gets corrected while listening to the audio.

>> All errors like wrong words, missed words or phrases etc gets fixed

>> Identify unclear and inaudible words

>> Corrects all punctuation marks and spellings

+ Second phase

In this phase all names and facts are corrected

>> Checks all names, location in the transcript

>> Remove any extra spaces and unnecessary capitalization etc

>> Creates a list of inaudible words, sentences and names

+ Third phase

>> Maintains the flow of the transcript

>> Removes repetition

>> Corrects all unnoticed grammar, spelling and punctuation marks

>> Smoothing syntax

>> Breaking up long sentences or paragraphs

>> Minor changes for more clarity

For accurate transcription of Oral History, approach a reliable service provider that can provide interview transcription. The right provider can transcribe interviews into accurate reports at competitive prices. These services have skilled transcriptionist and editors who provides final edited output.

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