Recording lectures, webinars, lessons, speeches are the best method of storing information for future generations. Transcription is used everywhere: professors to watch their lectures, students to refresh their knowledge, employers to show their business projects.
The most profitable and convenient transcription is for students and professors, as this method helps them return to the lectures and understand what point was missed, what should be corrected or what is missing. However, listening to records is the most tedious part of learning.
If you need to notate some information partially, the analysis of many hours of records is a waste of time, accumulating other significant unsolvable problems. Moreover, this approach does not guarantee success. Therefore, we have put together five simple tips on quickly and effectively dealing with this problem. Before we dip you into transcription methods, let’s find out what academic transcription means and why it’s essential.
Meaning And Importance Of Academic Transcription
Academic transcription is the conversion of audio or video to text. In other words, academic transcription involves the creation of written documents from an oral recording. Teachers use this method to save thoughts for future scientific publications. In addition, an academic transcription is a good tool for students with disabilities. For example, if a student has a hearing problem, they can view the transcription created by the teacher and not impair academic performance.
Other teachers use transcription to visualize information. Visual perception of data is much better than auditory. It is good that many professors understand this and try to get students as interested as possible in studying the topics of lessons. This is especially true during distance learning when the home environment distracts students from listening to lectures. By wearing headphones and turning on their favorite music, students can immerse themselves in a calm environment and study the materials.
As you can see, the importance of academic transcription for teachers is obvious, but what about students? After listening to the lecture, students can use the professors’ thoughts to create presentations. This will allow them to reveal the topic of the presentation correctly and demonstrate their interest in the teacher’s lectures. In addition, if a student is preparing a text version of an interview for an article, transcription will most accurately convey the speaker’s words.
Successful Ways to Deal With Creation of Academic Transcription
Whether you are a student or a teacher, academic transcription is beneficial to any of you. If you are new to this field or want to speed up the process of creating transcripts, check out our five tips!
1. Trust Professional Transcribers
Many of you may think that converting video or audio to text does not take much time or effort. As soon as you start the task, you will be in for a big disappointment. Creating a transcription means that you have to patiently listen to every second of the recording, write down word by word according to the hour marks, try to catch difficult words, and find out their meaning.
In this case, you will have to listen to the recording more than once since you have a great responsibility for the accuracy of the content. You must also learn to understand different accents and not pay attention to background noise, which can completely ruin the memorization of information. Also, don’t forget that we type at a slightly slower speed than we speak. So, transcribing a 10-minute recording can take more than three hours.
After a long listening and noting information, you will be responsible for multi-stage data verification and error correction. It is impossible to make mistakes in transcription, as this will worsen the perception of the material and may completely change the essence of the recording. If you do not have much time and are not ready for this challenge right now, you should trust an experienced transcriptionist.
What are the advantages of academic transcription services? Firstly, you save a lot of time – you will have the opportunity to work on more critical projects. Secondly, the experts have all the necessary skills and complete this task in the shortest possible time. Thirdly, you will receive an error-free paper that you can use immediately after downloading. There is no need to listen to the audio again, correct typos, and follow the content. In addition, by seeking the help of professional transcriptionists, you will receive a template that you can follow when creating your transcription.
2. Control the Sound Quality of Audio or Video Content
If you have plenty of time to create audio transcription yourself and want to learn how to complete the task quickly, the first thing you should pay attention to is the sound quality. Perhaps your current file contains a lot of background noise, different accents, long pauses, which means that the listening time of the recording may increase. Therefore, you must control the sound quality in the future to analyze the sound as quickly as possible.
Here are some tips to help you improve the quality of your audio or video content:
- When recording your voice, try to be quiet and not talk to other people.
- Check-in advance the storage of the instrument that will contain the file – you should have enough space to avoid re-recording the sound.
- Use tools that can record sound and text at the same time.
- Hold the gadget with the microphone as close to the speaker as possible.
- Use headphones to hear yourself better.
It is best to perform these methods together. Then you won’t have problems creating transcriptions, and you won’t need any extra help. However, if you have doubts about grammar and the text is required for research, contact a professional editor to avoid falling into the dirt in front of classmates or colleagues.
3. Train Research Skills
No matter the transcription topic, you should interpret difficult words quickly. This will help you answer questions from teachers or classmates who may be confused by unfamiliar words. This is especially true for technical topics, including many facts and terminologies that reveal the content well but are unclear to others.
Here are some tips to help you improve your research skills:
- Explore the industry. Lectures, webinars, lessons, speeches can be varied and beyond your understanding. If you come across strange words, try to identify the industry that the word is associated with. You will expect words in a similar style next, and the faster you identify the industry, the better you will understand the jargon used by the speaker.
- Study the topic. This stage is very similar to industry research. As in the previous paragraph, you need to study the topic carefully. Look for synonyms that are associated with the topic – so you can better understand the terms considered in the entry.
- Explore the geographic area. Sometimes it won’t be easy to transcribe a word due to the speaker’s accent. Therefore, find out what region the person is from. This way, you can identify words with a strong accent or any other slang used in the region.
- Check the website of the organization where the speaker works. Most often, words come from work in a person’s life. If some abbreviations, organizations, project names are difficult to transcribe, visit the platform where the speaker works. Here you will indeed find transcripts of the words you struggle with.
If none of these methods helped you find the transcriptions to the words, think about Google. This search engine stores millions of words that have been used in various texts. The platform will help you find the phonetic spelling word and its meaning.
4. Prefer Audio Instead of Video
If you need to convert audio to text, any player will open the file of your choice. In addition, you can quickly transfer the file to the player since the audio content does not take up much memory. However, if you have received video content, we recommend not transcribing it in this form. It is better to convert the video to audio in advance and transcribe the material.
Why is video content worse than audio? Video is always heavier than audio. You will need high-speed Internet and a lot of time to transfer the file to the gadget from which you will listen to information. This applies to those files that classmates, teachers, or colleagues can send you.
Install a program on your computer, phone, or tablet that will allow you to convert video to audio. Video conversion can take from a couple of minutes to several hours – everything depends on the size of the file. However, it is much faster than transferring video content to the instrument you transcribe the material.
5. Use the Formatting Tools
After transcribing and proofreading the file, you have to work with formatting. Do not publish documents that do not meet academic standards. Imagine how uncomfortable the text is without headings, paragraphs, and page numbering. What’s more, incorrectly formatted citations can lead to plagiarism, which will significantly reduce your academic reputation.
To save time on formatting, we recommend using the appropriate tools. It can be Google Docs or Word. Both programs automatically generate a bibliography from the sources used to write the document. Every time you add a new citation to a document, the tools add that source in the correct format: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, etc.
Also, in the programs, there are functions thanks to which you can automatically build indents, headings, fonts that correspond to the chosen style. Therefore, your document will exactly correspond to the standards put forward by the educational institution.
Conclusion
Academic transcription is complex, but you can speed up the process using proven methods. We have provided you with five practical ways to help you not only improve your typing skills or transcribe words faster but also create accurate and high-quality transcripts. Regularly making academic transcriptions will positively affect your reputation and allow you to refresh your vocabulary. We wish you good luck!
