Penguin Transcription

Free rice!0

OK, this has very little to do with transcription, but it’s great! Another one of those charity websites, but instead of ‘click on this boring old advertise link once a day and we’ll donate something’ you can donate by clicking the correct definition of a bunch of weird (and some not so weird) words. It’s not perfect - there’s the odd misspelt word in there, which for a vocabulary site isn’t ideal, and because the definitions are one or two words long on the whole, they’re obviously only one possible meaning of the word. Also of course you could donate more by working for half an hour and donating your earnings than by playing on this site, freerice.com and donating grains of rice. But it’s fun, it’s educational and a bunch of us had a fun competition going for a while to see who could reach the most difficult vocab level (which if you want to play, is level 50) first. Each time you get a few definitions right you go up a vocab level, and when you get one wrong you come down one.

Congratulations to my mum, Ruth Piatkus, for winning our little competition … a large bar of Galaxy awaits you.

No prizes on the site, but you do get the satisfaction of knowing that for every right word you donate 10 grains of rice to charity! ;o)

Posted: Grammar

Verbatim strikes again0

I have just spent two or three days editing a bunch of interviews for a client because he mistakenly thought he wanted them verbatim but in fact after reading the first few he realised they were rather hard to analyse. They read something like this: ‘So can I just ask you what, how, how, how … erm, what, I mean how er was it, how was it that you, when you were erm, thinking about the, the space programme, how was is that you er eventually de, de, decided to pull out of the project?’ When they were edited to remove excess ‘verbage’ the interviews (which were incidentally nothing to do with the space programme, I do respect client confidentiality!) were reduced in length by between 10 and 20 percent! So be really sure when you say you need verbatim - it’s a costly mistake, especially if you then have to pay for two to three days of editing! For more information see the information about Verbatim versus intelligent verbatim transcription on my website.

Posted: General Transcription