Verbatim and Non-Verbatim Transcriptions

'Verbatim' transcriptions are usually requested by the legal profession and academic institutions who require interviews recreated accurately and word for word.  Every pause, cough, "urm" or "er" is noted, and all words are typed as said.

An 'Intelligent Verbatim' transcript edits the words to develop a manuscript suitable for publication. Contractions are expanded, i.e. “cos" becomes "because" and grammatical errors are corrected. 

How long does it take to transcribe one hour of recorded speech?

In general, we speak four to five times faster than even the most experienced typist can transcribe the words. The industry standard allows 60 minutes to transcribe 15 minutes of clearly recorded speech. Consequently, a one hour clearly recorded audio file takes in the region of four hours to transcribe.

If the recording has a lot of background noise, involves several participants speaking over each other, or the recording is damaged in some way, it will obviously take more time to transcribe, as the transcriber will have to go over the recording several times in order to produce a coherent transcript. We would, however, inform you as soon as possible if the recording is proving difficult to prevent you from incurring additional charges.