Transcription

Practicing law is more than attending corporate meetings on a daily basis and walking through court hearings one after another. These are just the tip of the iceberg for common law firms. Even the big screen depicts it as the legal profession often associated with hard labors over mountains of paper works – may it be for drafting settlements or reading transcripts for an upcoming case.

By definition, legal transcripts are any spoken legal proceedings or dictions converted into text format. However simple that may seem, these documents play a big role in a variety of industries. Here are some few practices where legal transcriptions come in handy for law firms: 

1. Reviewing depositions. All matters in need of a legal resolution start with a deposition. Depositions are vital for it serves as the stage where parties gather all the necessary information to win a case or to settle a corporate dilemma. These include sworn testaments by individuals involved in the issue. These interrogations are often captured through audio or video recordings. After being mindful of asking the right questions, law practitioners then need to thoroughly analyze the collected data to build a case. If there’s time to spare, they can rewind the recordings to capture details they may have missed during the witness examination. However, since law practitioners are busy people in general, they should opt for an alternative that provides a faster and more accurate route on note taking and reviewing — deposition transcripts. With everything typed out, identifying key notes, dates, and evidences have never been easier!
2. Preparing for trials. Anything can happen in a courtroom. With both parties playing their best cards to a judge or jury, it is only reasonable to study everything to prepare for the next proceeding. A rebuttal in court may branch to a brand new lead and a fresh set of evidences — paving new strategies in potentially winning a case.  Legal transcripts help to easily pinpoint facts and take note of new ones mentioned during the trial. Unless you’re confident in your memory recall skills, having a written version of the proceeding might just save you from missing out on one tiny detail that could turn the tables and result to your victory in court.
3. Taking note of company meetings and conferences. Law firms are no exception from meeting marathons, whether it be to clients or within the organization. Moreover, there are local and international legal conferences being organized here and there that could widen a practitioner’s understanding and appreciation of the field. Transcripts are an effective and efficient method of keeping important records, reviewing meeting notes at leisure, and catching up on missed conferences that are beneficial to the company and its members.
4. Archiving. Much like any other industry, change is constant in the field of law. Deals may be tweaked, dismissed cases may be reopened, and legal advice may be altered. When instances like this happen, an archive saves the firm from going back to square one and redoing everything. Documents such as previous deposition transcripts and old meeting notes can be reevaluated to come up with another resolution.

In a way, legal transcriptions are written evidences of a law firm’s day-to-day activity. With every documented court hearing, client meeting, or company-wide assembly, transcripts are guilty in making filing and searching for particulars easy-breezy.

Video transcriptions have made it easier for people all over the world to understand and utilize media outputs. Not only does it help in increasing a video’s number of viewers but it gives more people the ability to understand it as well. These people include deaf or hard of hearing viewers, people who speak other languages, and those who are in a loud environment. Video transcriptions may contain different elements that can help make it more effective. Among these elements are time codes and timestamps.

Timestamps, in general, are used as time markers embedded in transcripts either in regular intervals or any time a particular event takes place — change of speaker, language, question, etc. These are used to find a specific point in long audio or video outputs. On the other hand, time codes for a video must be frame-accurate so adding the milliseconds are important. This element is commonly used for subtitles and video captions but it has other uses as well. Editors greatly benefit from these time codes as it allows them to use particular scenarios more easily and accurately synchronize subtitles with each scene.

A lot of transcription services offer both features, but the everyday layman may not know the different ways of using time codes or timestamps. When paired together, the two elements can be used to make video transcriptions more effective. Here are some of their uses:

• Uncertain Spelling

There are lots of English words that sound similar so distinguishing them from each other can be difficult. The same goes for similar sounding names that are spelled differently. This certain type of timestamp can be used if the transcriber isn’t sure of a particular word’s spelling. An example of this is shown below.

Eg. I met with [Stephen 02:43:01] last week to discuss about our current goals. — The spelling of this word is uncertain since “Stephen” can also sound like “Steven”.

• Garbled Words

In transcribing, there are cases where it’s difficult to make out what the speaker is saying, especially when there’s too much external noise. In these situations, stating which parts have inaudible words can be useful as this helps the client identify which words can’t be understood. It also gives the transcriptionist a way to note inaudible sounds rather than just guessing what word it was.

Eg. Our meeting will be held at [inaudible 00:27:16] tomorrow morning.

• Overlapping Speakers

During meetings, speakers overlapping with each other is common especially when there are a lot of participants. This timestamp can be used to identify who is talking at a specific interval. Most transcribing services simply mark the segment as [crosstalk] and then state the next parts that can be heard with the corresponding speaker.

• Speaker Change

A discussion doesn’t always have just one host — there are times when each topic is handled by different speakers. In order to identify this change, timestamps can be used every time a new host is heard to avoid confusion.

Eg.

[00:00] JM: What was your first impression when you used the product for the first time?

[00:09] DV: Well…honestly, at first, I was a bit skeptical since the product was a lot cheaper than normal so I didn’t really want to use it but I’m glad I did.

Transcribing video outputs can be difficult since they need to coincide with the video content. However, knowing the different uses of time codes and timestamps and how to effectively utilize them will greatly aid in producing quality video transcriptions that meets client satisfaction.

Source: https://earnsmartonlineclass.com/time-stamping-in-transcription-know-when-and-how-to-use-them/

There is a little-known French martial song dating back to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era whose beginning stanza goes like this:

J’aime l’oignon frît à l’huile,
J’aime l’oignon quand il est bon,
J’aime l’oignon frît à l’huile,
J’aime l’oignon, j’aime l’oignon. 

The words may seem, to non-speakers of French, to be flowing with the elegance and grace that is commonly associated by many with the official language of France. However, when translated into English, one of the most widely-spoken languages, the song quite quickly loses that elegance and grace and becomes something of a riddle for people unfamiliar with the song’s origins:

I love onion fried with oil,
I love the onion when it’s good,
I love onion fried with oil,
I love onion, I love onion.

What was once an elegant-sounding marching song now becomes a rather weird one (without the proper context, that is, for those with a penchant for reading French martial history will know why the song’s lyrics is such).

The above example illustrates why the understanding of foreign language is important, and why companies still continue to look for foreign language transcriptions services. After all, how are non-speakers of French to know that the song is basically talking about someone pouring out their love of onion without having someone translate it for them?

Some of the other benefits of having foreign language transcription include:

It facilitates the exchange of ideas

History is replete with examples of books and pamphlets and other kinds of text which originated from a certain country, painstakingly translated by an individual or group of individuals into different languages, and whose consumption by the greater mass enabled by these translations triggered massive societal changes. A famous example would be Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, which took the Catholic world by storm and ushered the Reformation and Protestantism, or Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which gave rise to communism and whose influence remains today in many schools of thought.

In the same vein, although perhaps not as societally-changing, translation and subsequent transcription of audio and/or video from its original language to another language allows the ideas of the participants to be recorded for posterity in another country or place, thus letting ideas freely flow from one country to another, from one individual to another, and from one culture to another.

Data is not limited to one place

People from one country can only give you so much data, and someday, the flow of fresh ideas from them will dry up or become negligible so as to be somewhat useless. The use of foreign language transcriptions rectifies this problem, for it allows people to gather fresh data from different countries.

It allows for larger and far-reaching decisions

Someone with access to a wider demographic because of foreign language transcriptions has the opportunity to really make sweeping changes to their structure or product line or whatnot, changes that can and will affect them and their target audience for generations to come. Because ideas for improvement are flowing not from one place but from many others, the company or individual is given the chance to review the data coming from all of the places and compile them into a record that can then be used to target certain demographics, such as all young men in the world, or all married women in the globe. This data can also be used in negotiating with potential customers or partners.

It facilitates the reaching of hearts and minds of people

Many people across the globe may not bother or may simply not have the time or resources to learn a new language, and thus remain monolingual. A company or person looking to connect and talk to those people at a personal or intimate level must be able to communicate with them in the language that they know. Foreign language transcription and translation of audio/video lets them bridge that gap of monolingualism, and successfully communicate what they want people to learn.

In a world where digital translation is easily available, and the number of people who are speaking English, arguably the most important language around, is ever-increasing, it is easy to doubt the importance of translating text. Nevertheless, there are no signs that every single person on the planet will adopt English as their only language. Translation is important, and this will no doubt be the case further into the future.

It is very easy to fall into the trap of dismissing transcriptions as just another one of the many things that may sound all well and grand and complicatedly awesome, but ultimately serves no purpose for you, your business, company or corporation, other than to leech off of your funds and give you another excuse to get more budget. It is also very easy to feel regret and humiliated when your competitors equipped with transcriptions from a proper transcriptions service grind you to the dust and leave you for the metaphorical carrions to devour.

When that happens, you may as well smash things around the office, for all the good that that will do for you (although it is heartily recommended that you not do so, and express your frustration at a more subdued level).

The benefits of transcriptions, especially at the corporate level, has often been discussed and debated upon. The benefits are many, yes, but without the proper knowledge of how to utilize conference call transcriptions, they may as well be junk or trash.

So, how exactly do you use corporate transcriptions? How should you utilize them so that they help you and your company reach the top and be the ones leaving others in the dust and to the metaphorical carrions, instead of the other way around?

1. Get your corporate transcriptions printed – or make digital devices comfortable for people

The first thing you must do is get all of the transcriptions – whether they’re from a conference call, a meeting, or an interview – that you will undoubtedly use printed. Digital copies of transcriptions are all well and good, but they do have limitations and negatives, one of the most glaring being the fact that it is rather tiring for the eyes to keep looking at a computer or tablet screen for too long while reading text. Besides, reading comprehension is better when people read from paper rather than from digitally. Not only that, people can also take around the paper stuff anywhere and review them – not that there’s no guarantee that they will do that, mind you.

Granted, the abovementioned step may be impossible to do if, say, your company’s striving for a paperless environment or there’s somehow no printer around anywhere in the office, in which case you’re stuck to doing things the digital way. If this is so, make sure that the settings of the digital devices used by employees can be adjusted. Simple things like adjusting the brightness of a computer screen or tilting a screen sideways can and will greatly boost digital reading comprehension and make the experience of reviewing even business papers at least tolerable, if not outright pleasant.

2. Summarize important points

Get a pen or highlighter or even an old-fashioned pencil – or use a digital highlighting tool of some kind – and get to underlining important points and, wherever pertinent, taking down notes and observations about them. Summarizing not only reduces clutter and removes pointless stuff, but it also allows people to review the material on hand again and again. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

Of course, your people might be overworked or tired or simply don’t have the motivation to do another somewhat boring task. If so, then look to hire a meeting minutes service that can do the summarizing for you. Some transcription services, aside from offering transcriptions, can also offer this feature at a low additional cost, so definitely ask when you look to hiring them to do transcriptions for you.

3. Give every relevant person a copy of transcription

Your corporate transcriptions are utterly useless when they are simply lying around the office or taking up space in digital devices with no one but a select few having access to them. Therefore, give every person involved, with the proper security clearance, a copy of the transcriptions, so that they have a chance to review things and take notes themselves. They will thank you for it, and you will thank yourself for doing it later on.

4. When someone asks for a copy, give it to them

Now, when an important person in the company – maybe your boss, or if you are the boss, a shareholder or partner – or your customer asks for notes on a meeting that was conducted a few days ago perhaps, what do you do? Do you refuse them? Do you say, “No, I don’t have a copy or anything, sorry,” Of course not! Communicating valuable knowledge about the company is extremely important to every stakeholder and relays transparency and willingness to cooperate for the success of the business or organization.

5. Make sure that meetings and conference calls go okay

Having a transcription of meetings and conference calls of your company is all well and good, but they can only really help you when they are of high quality. Aside from making sure that you hire a good transcriptions service, which should be your number one priority when choosing who to hire, make sure that all meetings and conference calls are properly arranged and moderated, and that all participants stay on track. What use is a meeting where all the participants only discuss about that department-wide dinner last Saturday, or a conference call where everything goes wrong? Keep in mind the many things that you have to do to ensure that meetings will go well to get high quality recordings for conference call transcriptions.

There are, of course, a few other things that can be mentioned here, but the abovementioned ones are really the most important to consider. Keep them in mind, and remember them next time you get corporate transcriptions made by a transcriptions service.