Affordable Transcription for Research Interviews

f you've conducted some research including one-to-one interviews, and then realised how much work is involved in transcribing them, you'll probably be looking for an affordable transcription service. There are many transcription services available but sometimes an affordable transcription service can seem hard to find. Transcription is not cheap, because it is a lot more involved than copy typing, but that doesn't mean you can't find affordable transcription, and what's more, by providing good quality recordings you can make the transcription more affordable, as it will take less time to complete.

You could do the transcription yourself, but if you are not a fast touch-typist and do not have specialist transcription equipment then it will take you a very long time. I have had clients come to me saying they started the work themselves and it was taking them 20 hours to produce a transcript of a 1-hour recording. That's why they ended up using a transcription service!

The most important thing to remember is that it's just not possible to type as fast as you speak. Even an experienced transcriptionist will be able to average four times as long for a good, clear one-to-one interview - so an hour of recording will take an average of four hours to transcribe. (Industry standards obtained from the Industry Production Standards Guide (1998), published by OBC, Columbus, OH, USA) Transcriptionists also have to make sense of what's being said, punctuate the speech correctly and use the right homophones (words like there/their/they're that sound the same but are spelt differently.)

So how can you make sure that your transcript is clear, in order to get an affordable transcription price? Basically, the easier you make the transcription for the transcriptionist, the more likely they are to be able to give you an affordable transcription quote.

First of all, use the best transcription equipment you can afford, and make sure it's fit for purpose. This means that for interviews you should have a recorded with an external microphone rather than one built into the recorder, which is only designed to pick up one voice dictating. For focus groups you should have several microphones so that all participants are close to a mike, and for conferences the speakers should have good microphones and there should also be people in the audience with 'roving' microphones to take around to any audience members wanting to ask a question.

More and more transcriptionists are only taking on digital work now, rather than tapes, so to give yourself the broadest base to chose from you might want to consider using a digital recording method. These are also usually better quality.

Next, you should prepare well before each interview. Make sure that, if at all possible you have arranged a quiet meeting room, as background noise will dramatically increase the time taken to transcribe the recording, as the transcriptionist may have to listen to sections several times in order to capture the interview speech. It is helpful to spell out your interviewee's name at the beginning of the tape, before starting the interview, and speak out any information you would like on the transcript header e.g. the date, the job title of your interviewee etc.

During the interview, unless you need to interrupt in order to take back control of the interview, try not to speak over your interviewee. Often in a normal conversation we say 'yeah, yeah, yeah' or 'right' or 'OK' more to indicate we're listening than for any other reason. Every time you say that you are likely to be obscuring a much more important word or group of words spoken by your interviewee.

After the interview, it is enormously helpful if you can include a list of key words for the transcriptionist. Although we're happy to go on a 'Google hunt', searching the internet to find out how to spell technical terms, names of drugs, names of organisations etc., if you can provide this info in advance it certainly saves time, and saving time saves you money, again reaching toward that goal of an affordable transcription price. Technical work will always be more expensive than non-technical, but providing a 'crib sheet' of key words should reduce the cost.


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