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Re: Transcript question

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From: Mallory
Date: Apr 8, 2020 6:12AM

Hm. One thing I'd want to point out is, hearing people listening to someone hem and haw and speaking with lots of dysfluency will filter a lot of that out mentally, to the point that asking the same hearing person to write transcripts/captions for it are often surprised how bad it is.

We don't know that people reading text can do this as easily. I know if *I'm* reading it, I have a lot of trouble with too much dysfluency. I don't write transcripts or captions professionally, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but I tend to include things like cut-off sentences and longer pauses with "uhh..." but I don't include all of them. Some people literally speak like this:
Interviewee: "So, uh, as I was, uh, I was saying that, you know... well, you saw what, um, Mr Soandso stated, and... well, and so that's just... We need to be careful about statements like that, you know? Because it's, uh, it can be very serious and people need to take these things very se-- This is, this is, can be a matter of life and death, you know? And we just need to be, uh... need to be careful of that. These things. And just--"
Interviewer: "So then what about..." (had spoken at exactly the same time as the last two sentences...)

The above can be very difficult to read. And these would mostly not be added to live captioning unless the speaker was being very slow and taking a lot of time. I tend to turn the thing above into something more like
Interviewee: "So, as I was saying... You saw what Mr Soandso stated, and that's just... We need to be careful about statements like that, you know? Because it can be very serious and people need to take these things very se-- This can be a matter of life and death, you know? And we just need to be careful of that. [Of] these things. And just--"
Interviewer [interjecting over the last two sentences]: "So then what about..."

Especially if the intonation of the speaker makes it clearer (or not) about what one sentence versus another is referring to, I'll even add in edits in brackets. That might be against transcripting rules but I've seen it my whole life in written interviews in newspapers and magazines and if I'm not told otherwise I may add them.

I did a quick transcript of a guy being interviewed by Rachel Maddow because I wanted to retweet the clip (which first had no captions, then later really crappy live captions which lost a lot of text because the guy talked a mile a minute). At some point the interviewee did this big sigh with raised shoulders, and I added that as well because it wasn't a dysfluency. He was making a point with it. Sometimes signs people make with their hands or face, I'll add within the square brackets as well, because the transcript might be read by someone who can't see the video.

cheers,
Mallory

> On Apr 7, 2020, at 5:06 PM, " <EMAIL REMOVED> " < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Glen,
>
> Thank you for the links. Since I'm working with an automatic caption file, I'm hopeful to find some guidance on punctuation. There are a lot of repeated words that I'm fighting with Microsoft Word about and some other sentence/grammatical stuff, but again, not sure how much of that kind of thing, if any, is mine to edit/correct. Again, thanks for the link resources.
>
> Katie Frederick
>
>
>