I’m wondering…
I am trying my hand at general transcription. I found a good source for jobs, they seem to be conscientious, legitimate, pay decent and they are willing to train me. I always thought I was fairly quick (77 wpm) but I’m discovering that that’s not all that fast. However, I like the work, it’s interesting so far and except for one poor audio test script, I haven’t had a hard time hearing the speakers.
I don’t have a foot pedal yet, I ordered it and it’s on the way. How much of a difference will that make? It just seems like I’m very slow right now even with using the hot keys to rewind, ff, etc. The editor and owner of the business have liked what I turned in so far and say that I will get much faster over time, but right now I think I’m zipping along fine and then I look up and see I’ve done 15 minutes in almost two hours :smack:.
Any tips? I’m working with Word 2007, trying to get shortcuts and Autocorrect working right but anything else would be great. I’m new to it- like I said I like the work-but at this rate I will make no $$ at it so hoping to hear that the pedal will help.
I haven’t done any transcribing for years, but when I did, the foot pedal made a huge difference. It was set up so that when I let up on the pedal, the tape would automatically back up for a second or two. That kept me from having to rewind in case I missed part of a word. But even without that feature, it was much faster than taking my hand off the keyboard.
I did some home transcription using a machine without a foot pedal, and I’ll bet it took twice as long.
What kind of transcription are you doing? If you’re encountering a lot of similar phrases or long words/names that are difficult to spell, make a macro for them so you can enter them with just a couple of strokes.
Time isn’t an issue for me when I type at work (I’m paid by the hour), but if it was, I’d set up style formats so I wouldn’t have to think about margins, line spacing, page numbers, etc. for each document.
The only other hint I can think of is to Save every few minutes to keep from losing your work in case of a power shortage or a computer crash.
Thanks for replying- I feel better because she told me that I would probably start out 4 hours of work for 1 hour of tape and it has been nearly double that without a pedal. Some of that has been working out my formattng quirks and I did get my headers, margins and stuff sorted out now and that’s helped a bit.
I am just doing general- so far it’s been mostly market research groups, community meetings, etc. So usually between 5-10 speakers. I really panicked at my test because the owner told me it was going to be an easy audio and I had such a hard time with it but the editor returned it back with the corrections, saying I did a great job considering the audio was so bad LOL.
I am trying to make a decision over the next few weeks, I may do this full time for now and give up the fruitless job search (keeping my ear out of course ;). But I don’t want to devote too much time to it if I don’t get up to speed within a reasonable time. I’ve always been fast at data entry and have a good grammar/spelling sense but this is MUCH harder than I expected.
Oh ugh! I can’t even imagine transcribing several speakers, some of whom might not even be close to a microphone. And the speakers probably aren’t taking any pains to speak clearly.
I transcribed from dictation and that’s a whole 'nother thing.
Is medical transcription an option? I don’t know how hard it is to get into the field, but at least you’d be hearing just one voice at a time, and they’d be giving some consideration to making sure they were understood.
I might look into medical transcription later, but they are getting stricter on taking courses, knowing medical terminology (I know some from being a veterinary employee forever, but not quite the depth), etc. Some even require two years of acute care experience, so that’s not an option now. I’ve done some one on one dictation through iDictate but not getting regular jobs there and doesn’t pay nearly as well. It can be difficult, especially when they all decide to talk at once LOL.