Conference Transcription – What the conference organiser needs to know

This article aims to provide advice to conference organisers in obtaining transcription that is accurate, timely and complete. It suggests ways in which the conference organiser can help the transcriptionist to ensure that the transcription is good quality and free of errors.

The most important piece of advice I would give as a transcriptionist is that if you’re going to have your conference transcribed you should arrange for completion of the transcription even before the conference even takes place! Of course you are going to want to send the transcript (or your interpretation of it) out to your speakers and delegates as soon as possible after the conference takes place, but a conference is a significant chunk of work to transcribe.

Let’s take an example of a conference where the talks (and possible workshops etc.) total 5 hours. Even if you have excellent audio recording equipment and supremely clear speakers, with minimal question and answer sessions or workshops (the point of which I will explain in a moment) the time taken to transcribe is going to be four times as long as the recording – so you’re looking at an absolute minimum length of time taken in this example of 20 hours. Twenty hours of work is probably a minimum of three days work for one person, and there’s a very good chance it will take longer.

Now if you start ringing round transcription companies once you have the recording ready to send, and you’re hoping to have the transcript returned to you in two or three days, you’re probably going to be out of luck. A good, established transcription company, employing fully trained and competent transcriptionists who are able not just to type but also to proof-read and edit, recognise the correct homophones (words that sound the same but are spelt differently), and punctuate English correctly, is probably not going to be sitting there waiting for your call. Although you might strike lucky they will probably be booked up for at least a few days!

So if you book in your recording before the conference and agree to send it on a certain date, they will be able to turn it around for you much faster.

Now, why might it take longer than four times the length of the recording? There are wide variety of reasons. Four times is the industry standard for a good, clear one-to-one interview with no background noise, good recording quality and no strong accents. It also does not take into account the possibility of specialist or technical terms, with which the transcriptionist will need to become familiar. So if you have any of those issues there will be extra time involved.

Question and answer sessions are often tricky because of the range of different voices involved. This applies to the audience but also to a panel if you are having panel sessions.

What can you do to reduce the time and therefore the cost? Firstly you can make sure that you have ‘roaming microphones’ that can be carried around the audience, so that questions are actually audible on the recording. Also a good conference recording set-up so that your main speakers can be clearly heard and individual microphones for each member of the panel.

Another very useful tip is to provide the transcriptionist with both a speaker list and a delegate list. Then during the conference ask the chairman to ask all delegates to state their name and position before asking the question. The transcriptionist may not be sure of the spelling but can then refer back to the delegate list to insert the correct spelling into the transcript. The same applies, of course, to speakers.

It is also very useful to provide the transcriptionist with any supporting material on the conference that you have available as this will help to establish ‘key words’, words that may be not in common usage but particularly relevant to the topic of the conference. A good transcriptionist will also probably be able to search out most unusual words using Google or a similar search engine, but this takes extra time, and if you have already provided material to help time will be saved.

Finally, if at all possible (and you may be at the mercy of the conference venue) make a digital recording, rather than a recording on cassette tapes. Digital recordings have a variety of advantages (please see some of my other articles for details) but importantly they are usually better quality than tapes and they can be worked on by more than one transcriptionist at the same time, meaning that your transcription will be completed sooner.