How did "old fashoned" Court recorders work?

Factual Questions
41

In the Court of Quebec, everything is audio-recorded. A transcript can be ordered but I don’t know who’s responsible for producing it, how much it costs, or who pays.

The really impressive thing, to me, is the House of Commons and Senate Hansards (the equivalent of the congressional records). Everything said every day in both houses is transcribed nearly verbatim (they leave out repetitions, slips of the tongue, and some but not all of the normal procedural formulae) – I don’t know what system they use – and then translated in its entirety into the other official language. And amazingly, it’s generally available online by 1 a.m. the night of the sitting day.

The Hansards are often used as a corpus for machine translation projects because they’re one of the largest parallel bilingual corpora in the world.

42

My sister is a court reporter, but she uses a recording device with two audio tracks. One records the testimony and the other is connected to a mask that she whispers (repeats) what is being said. When she is done, she forwards the audio file to a typist who transcribes the audio into written form.

I’ve told her that she needs to move into the real-time stenography discussed above or else in the next few years she will be resorting to street prostitution to feed herself (joking) but she will have none of it. She says stenography is what is on the way out…