Hey,
I'm supposed to be doing some transcription but it is a nightmare! poor quality and speakers who mumble. Any one else had it up to the back teeth with transcribing?
Really struggling to get this finished
xx

I nearly had a breakdown about 2 weeks ago about my transcribing. I am about a year behind with it. And I went to catch up and found most of the sound files were awful - you can hardly hear the speaker and there is a constant buzz. Luckily my bro is a sound engineer, and cleared them up. I then outsourced them to a friend of mine for abour £20 per transcript. My sup was ok with that (last year when she thought I did them :$ ) so thought it is fine to do now and that means I can get on with other stuff!

I was lucky in that my supervisor was able to pay for me to have some of them transcribed verbatim. However it is down to me to do the Jeffersonian transcription and I'm really struggling to complete it. I have done the bulk of it, but have extracts from 5 or so groups left to do. Focus groups with teenagers who mumble and talk over each other. One of the particpants I had to keep asking her to remove her coat from in front of her mouth!!! argh!!
xx

do get 'transcription buddy' from download.com it has a 30 day free trial (which you can uninstall and reinstall and start the trial again hehe). It allows you to put in automatic pauses and set the timings

For example, you can set it to..

play 15 secs
rewind 7 secs
pause 3 secs
play 15 secs

So it continually loops and you never have to press pauses - well worth it!

Thanks for the ercommendation. I'll have a look, but I have a transcription pedal so not sure how much more help it will be. It's just such a demoralising task i find - it's more motivation that's the problem!!
xxx

Hi Leanne,

you have my sympathy, I have been through the same process. The transcribing takes ages, often due to partipants mumbling, several speaking at the same time etc. etc. Often participants go on and on about something irrelevant and it takes takes to transcribe, while you know it won't be of value.

I know it is too late now, but the advice, on this forum, to get a quality microfone was a very good one.

Finally, although it was a pain, eventually I was happy that I had done the transcriptions myself, as I think it provides a much better understanding of the material one has collected.

Hi Rick,
I agree completely about it being worth it - my data is completely different. So much richer and more worthwhile.
The microphone was an ok one, but the rooms that I had to use were not great acoustically - one big old fashioned science class room for example.
It's just finding that motivation to get on with the big last push of transcription. I'm so desperate to get on with analysis, but at the same time struggle to stay focused on the transcription.
I'm in the process of sorting out my extracts - thought I had messed up royally and wasted weeks! - so will get started in the morning and just try and get my head down and do it
I'll get there eventually I just needed to whinge!