Throughout our everyday lives, it is incredibly common for the average person to make a few innocent mistakes here and there, whether it be through taking the wrong turn on your way to work or simply calling your mom by the wrong name. Either way, these mistakes can be harmless in most cases, except while transcribing your own work, which can lead to writing that may be viewed as unprofessional or even incoherent. With help from this brief article, you can learn a few ways to avoid such mistakes in your own personal work as well as why you should consider the transcription services provided by IL Consultancy for all of your heftier tasks.
The Importance of Ensuring That Your Written Work Remains Flawless
Whenever you find yourself transcribing lengthy pieces of text from a video or audio file, especially for the purposes of showcasing it to a large audience in any context, it is vital that you ensure that your work is of the highest quality and without any faults. This will not only cement your audience’s perception of you as a professional transcriber with a keen eye for the right words but will also allow your points to come across as clearly as you need them to be. In turn, the written work you put out into the world will only serve to work for you in the long run, potentially drawing in new clients from around the globe.
While many may believe that transcriptions are just another seemingly meaningless addition to any audio or visual work, it is actually heavily relied upon by a variety of fields as well as groups of people. Transcriptions have become a valuable commodity for those studying and working within countless legal, medical, and academic fields. Additionally, transcriptions may be the only route that some people may have in order to understand any audio or visual work, especially those that live with hearing disabilities.
By ignoring any mistakes that you may come across, or by simply not noticing them, your work may end up receiving a completely different response. Audiences may be left confused regarding the points being brought up, as well as underwhelmed or even frustrated by your work as a whole. This will only work to reflect badly on your past and future work, as well as yourself as a transcriber.
Thankfully, just as there may be countless forms of mistakes that can crop up in your work, there may be just as many solutions that you can use to rectify them to ensure that your work remains airtight and near flawless as a result. These errors may be fairly easy to handle on short-form or personal pieces of work but can become overwhelming to start correcting when transcribing longer audio and video snippets that come to you in abundance on a professional basis. This is why it may be highly beneficial to consider outsourcing the work of your clients as well as your own to a company that provides high-quality and trustworthy transcription services, namely IL Consultancy (IL Consultancy).
Common Reasons Behind Why Some Transcription Mistakes Are Made
At IL Consultancy, we have compiled a number of the most common mistakes made by transcribers across the world, some being far simpler to rectify than others while still remaining incredibly detrimental to the overall quality of the work being provided. These mistakes can be the result of a number of different aspects, many of which can come into play before the transcription has even started. The leading reasons behind most mistakes made by anyone performing transcription services would include but are not nearly limited to:
- Similar sounding words that have entirely different definitions and uses.
- The writer has failed to proofread the finished transcript thoroughly or even at all.
- The usual formatting standards are not being followed correctly.
- The writer may not have proper training or enough experience in the terminology used within certain fields, as well as performing transcriptions as a whole.
- The media being transcribed may have poor audio quality, leading to the transcriber misunderstanding the work being presented to them.
This may very well be only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many reasons behind why certain mistakes are made while transcribing a video or audio work. Now that you are a bit more aware of where your written faults may begin to crop up, it can provide you with a bit more self-awareness in regards to where your transcriptions need to improve. However, as important as it is to realize where your mistakes may stem from, it is just as important to become aware of the individual mistakes themselves.
Most Common Mistakes Made When Without Transcription Services
Mishearing Certain Words
As a large portion of transcription work comes down to listening to audio files, it can be common for certain words or even entire phrases to be misheard or misunderstood by the transcriber in question. For instance, it is common for words such as “lose” and “loose”, “vain” and “fame”, and so on, to be easily mistaken for one another while in the heat of the moment, or at least while transcribing. This may seem like a simple mistake at first, but it is one that can lead to the entire meaning of the sentence or paragraph changing, or not even making sense at all.
Spelling Errors and Atomic Typos
Typing errors may just be silly mistakes in the form of writing “firendly” instead of “friendly”. While errors such as this can be picked up by the spellchecker that comes with many different programs and thus corrected swiftly, it can still go under the radar for some as a result of the plethora of different programs and system settings that some transcribers opt into using. Atomic typos on the other hand are an entirely different story.
These can be far easier to miss than standard spelling or typing errors as they seem to fit in with the rest of the text fairly naturally, which can just as easily lead to unfavourable consequences in terms of audience reception. This is because atomic typos appear when the transcriber types only a single letter incorrectly, but this time forming a different word that already exists. This allows an atomic typo to potentially change the meaning of your text and confuse your audience, while also surpassing your spellchecker entirely. Examples of atomic typos can include “sea” and “see”, “unclear” and “nuclear” and so on.
Misspelling Names
It may be impossible not to mispronounce someone’s name at least once in your life. Misspelling names can be incredibly common in certain transcription services as even common names that everyone has heard can have multiple variations on its spelling. Names that are commonly misspelled as a result of this include “Daniel”, “Danial”, and “Danielle” etc.
With so many different ways of the average transcriber being susceptible to mistakes, it is practically a miracle each time an audio or video file is transcribed absolutely perfectly. Thankfully, companies that provide transcription services such as ours at IL Consultancy are still able to provide work that is high in quality, and easily understood by all. This is because of the many different techniques and approaches our skilled writers use while on the job, ensuring that no mistake goes unnoticed and that all are attended to.
How You Can Avoid Making Any Transcription Mistakes in the Future
Disable Your Autocorrect Immediately
Autocorrect may seem like an easy way to speed up the processing of transcribing spoken words into a written format. However, transcribing services are rarely ever conducted using this common feature as it is the source of many typos and general errors, many going unnoticed then after as the program no longer presents it as a mistake. On Windows computers, you can turn your autocorrect off via Settings > Devices > Typing in Windows, while Mac users can turn theirs off via System Preferences > Keyboard > Text.
Proofread Your Work Multiple Times
Before handing your work back to your client or to your audience, you should first proofread your work 2 or more times. Many of the most esteemed transcription services often have transcriptions read over once for each mistake, and then also by multiple sets of eyes. This allows the work to be combed through many different times, ensuring that each and every single mistake is seen and attended to without fail.
Creating Checklists and Templates
By creating a certain structure to the way that you complete your transcription services, completing certain aspects in a specific order, you not only allow your work to be approached in a more systematic and calculated manner that ensures quality results when implemented correctly and continuously, but you also allow yourself to become more efficient in your craft too.
Purchase High-Quality Audio Input and Output Equipment
If you are recording your own visual and audio files that need to be transcribed, it is vital that you invest in a professional mic and headset. By ensuring that your voice can be recorded and heard clearly, you make it significantly easier to avoid any confusion and frustration that may arise during the transcribing process.
Outsource Your Work to Professional Transcription Services
One of the best ways to ensure that your work is able to receive the proper love, care, and attention it deserves is by hiring the transcription services of a reliable and widely renowned company. While there are countless companies that already provide such services to middling results, we can ensure you that results are consistently high in quality when hiring our qualified and skilled writers through IL Consultancy. Much like many of the most coveted transcription services advertised throughout the world, we have all the required language skills and knowledge, relevant experience as well as the tools and resources needed in order to provide you with a job well done. This comes with the added benefit of saving you heaps of time as you are no longer required to go over your work an innumerable amount of times, and can instead move on to the next project with absolute peace of mind.
Why You Should Consider Hiring Transcription Services from IL Consultancy?
If you are looking for a company that is able to provide you with outstanding written work while allowing you to save both time and money? This is something that you will find and more when hiring IL Consultancy’s highly skilled and prompt writers as they are able to cover services ranging from translation to editing, transcription to proofreading, and far more. To get into contact today, simply click on the “Contact” button found in the top right corner of our website’s homepage, where you will be provided a number of different contact methods to provide you with greater convenience. This includes our business number, email, and physical address as well as a fill-in form on our website itself.