Part 1: Ear Training
This post is intended to help non-speakers of English, who are training to become transcribers, and may need some help on how to become better at this job. One of the most basic activities done to heighten a professional transcriber’s accuracy is to keep the ear trained in that specific field. In most cases, this field is represented by the English language, since at least 90% of the audio files to be transcribed are recorded in this language. Here, we won’t talk about a transcriber’s job in the sense of typing, but only about training your ear to an extent that the process of converting voice to text seems easier. Not many people can perform this job with high accuracy, and even if they get the accuracy part, it’s difficult to do it fast.
Sometimes the tricky part is the intensity of the sound, the speaker can speak in a whisper or sometimes can speak too loud. A lot of times, the most challenging aspect is the audio quality, how the audio is recorded, the circumstances, the recorder used, background chatter, crosstalking, all contribute to how the final recording sounds. Sometimes, the recorded audio is full of static noises, and the speaker can sound quite high pitched, and this requires a lot of sound processing to ease out the audio a little bit, or maybe use bigger headphones with more bass to cancel out the static. Another challenging issue can be the talking speed, or the speaker’s accuracy of pronunciation. On top of this, and more importantly can be the accent, because more often than not, the speaker’s mother tongue is not English.
While you may only get used to all this over time, it’s important to do some things to help yourself. Some of the best things you can do to train your ear for these different aspects is to watch English movies, sitcoms, soap operas, listen to English music, read English literature. Reading can make you acclimatized with many words, especially if you’re not a native English speaker. When you’re watching movies, and if it’s too hard to understand, have the English subtitles on, for a start, and then as you become more familiar with the sounds, switch subtitles off. The ideal thing would be to have not only Hollywood movies to watch, but movies from Europe, mainly UK productions, then we have Australian, or even some other TV shows or interviews with people talking in English with different accents. Hopefully these tips would help you land a good job with a professional transcription service.
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