Skills For Home Based Transcription
The main skills for home based transcription are: Being a good typist. No point doing transcription work if your typing is not good as it won't be worth your while in the end as these days most typists are paid by the audio minute or by the line, so the longer you take to get through the audio the worse your hourly rate ends up being. The faster and more accurate you are, then of course you can earn a very impressive income from this line of work. Know your grammar. You must know correct spelling and grammar, and where possible use the internet to your advantage and research terms and names that come up in the audio to produce a better quality work. By using Google I vastly improve the audio that I am returning by using correct spelling of names, places, etc, etc. Also using English as an example, I'm in Australia and some transcription I have to use British English spelling and for other work I have to use American English spelling. So it's wise to know the differences. Computer savvy As most transcription is digital these days it's wise to be a bit computer savvy, so that you can access client websites to grab the audio from, load it onto your hard drive and transcription platform, etc and then load completed work back to client website. Or if working for small clients, using file transfer protocols to grab the audio from, etc, etc. And the most important skill in my books: More often than not a typist will type what she thinks she's heard instead of what is actually being said. I have worked with several transcription companies over the years as a transcriber and have heard the most unbelievable stories of work being returned and some work virtually 95% incorrect as what was typed was not what was said. Being able to hear what is said and understand the myriad of accents that are heard in all sorts of audios and being able to type down what is said is a real skill. Some audio quality may not be good and you have to develop an ear for this work. Nowadays audio that I considered shocking years ago is easy for me to type. You have to deal with all sorts of audio qualities, accents from all over the world and terminology that may be unfamiliar to you. You may specialise in a certain field and that is an advantage to you in terms of transcription. I speciliase in financial markets and cruise through the vast and sometimes strange terminology in this field of work. Then there is the issue of verbatim transcription that is sometimes required. This means that you must type every little thing you hear word for word, ie: all umms and ahhs left in, all repetitions, every single word and as these sorts of transcriptions are usually required for investigations or courts, etc, it's imperative that what you type is absolutely correct. It's not that easy a field to get into, simply because you have years of office or secretarial experience behind you. Clients want their work transcribed correctly and in a timely fashion too. But I hope I haven't scared you off. With practise (go to free transcription tests) you will become a proficient transcriber and have the skills for home based transcription and can start taking on this kind of work. If you work with a transcription company, ie: subcontract to them, then they generally check your work before it's passed on to the actual client, so that's great, because sometimes a second set of ears can fix up some of your mistakes or areas you're not sure of that you would have marked up with a time stamp to be checked by the transcription company. If you are working directly with a client doing their transcription, then you don't have this luxury, so your skills for home based transcription really have to be very proficient, as you don't have that other set of ears on hand.
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