Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Podcasts - Is Transcription a Good Idea?

Podcasts were initially used to let people to administer their ain content or radiocommunication style shows to a wider audience. The lucidity of a podcast digital recording have got been ideal for a assortment of media, such as as school lessons, touristry sound guides, unwritten history interviews, radiocommunication programmes, magazines, political broadcasts, sermons, television commentary, newspapers and even wellness guides.

So why make you necessitate a podcast written text if you have the audio? The content of audio recordings on the Internet is not readily searchable and, therefore, indexed and classified by the hunt engines. This renders your podcast almost unseeable unless you pass clip advertisement it or burden the show short letters with relevant keywords. Increasingly, podcasters are providing a copy of either extracts to be included in the show notes, or a full copy of the podcast, which can be uploaded to the Internet alongside the audio recording. The copy will then demo up in the hunt engine consequences like any other written document or website.

It could be argued that a podcast is already in an accessible formatting and why add to the reams of written stuff already on the Internet? Some people state it overcomes the physical object of hearing to a podcast and takes away the impact of the ambiance and style of the voices. That's true, up to a point – unless you go on to be deaf, or with even slightly impaired hearing. In the same manner that a whole sound data file recordings industry have been created for those with sight problems, (talking books being the most obvious example), copies or closed captions / subtitles can do podcasts available to a more than deprived audience. If you can't hear clearly, then your lone option is to read – and podcasters should be witting of this. This is particularly to the point now, since the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the Communications Act 2003 promote the proviso of full accessible content for all broadcasts. The sound data files can assist the visually impaired while captions or a full copy can be very utile for the hearing impaired. Obviously, there are some podcasts such as as concerts or music shows where written text do small sense. But there's a whole array of programs which would be unaccessible to a batch of people without this further written resource.

Podcast copies can be tweaked to guarantee the hunt engines can happen you by adding relevant hyperlinks, or you can supply an index of keywords. This do the copy searchable – not only by the hunt engines but by anybody wishing to happen a peculiar subdivision in a hurry. You can even interrupt the copy up into subdivisions if the podcast covers different subjects. Each subdivision can be placed on a separate web page with its ain meta tags and keywords, plus a nexus to the podcast recording itself.

Another point to see is that some people prefer to read content because it's quicker than hearing to an audio file. There may be some podcasts where your audience may only desire to listen to a little subdivision of the full programme. Without a copy with clip markers inserted in it, they would have got to listen to the whole recording or bobbin back and forth in order to seek to happen the relevant bit. With a time-stamped transcript, they can travel specifically to the point they desire to listen to, or they can read the copy for that section. This doesn't intend you're going to lose 'listeners' by doing that. By providing all the options for your audience, they'll retrieve which podcasts are more than user friendly than others.

Reading a copy can also be helpful if the voices on the podcast are difficult to understand, such as as when person talks at 'machine gun speed'. Trying to concentrate to catch every nicety of what they're saying tin be very wearing! Having a back-up copy can be helpful in such as fortune for those who would prefer to read rather than listen, and to perhaps clear up any spots they didn't hear clearly the first clip round.

What is of import is that podcasters should supply their audience with a choice. Sometimes people will prefer to listen to the full programme and sometimes they'll take to read a transcript; and that pick can be governed as much by the clip available to them as by their personal preferences. A quality podcast supported by a copy will always bring forth more than involvement and a larger audience than an audio podcast on its own.

So, having decided that transcribing your podcasts is a good idea, what else make you necessitate to consider? You necessitate to make up one's mind what type of copy would be suitable. In the written text industry, there are generally three styles available: Complete Verbatim, Intelligent Direct and Edited Transcript. The most popular pick for podcasts is Intelligent Verbatim. This guarantees a full, accurate copy but excludes all the 'ums', 'ahs', repeats and verbal wonts people develop, such as as inordinate usage of 'you know' and 'kind of'. These meaningless fillers add nil to the linguistic context of the copy and take longer to transcribe. It do sense to cut all that out, but go forth the remainder exactly as spoken, to reserve the overall style of the individual speaking. This also do for a much easier copy to read, and significantly cuts down on written text clip and costs. For podcast interviews, there may be a happy medium whereby the inquiries can be 'tidied' up and the interviewee's responses left in full.

Complete Direct is a copy of absolutely everything said, including every repetition, verbal oddity or cases where people float off in mid remark with no logical end to a sentence. It enterprises to capture the conversational 'style' of the person, plus any idiom forms and emotions where applicable. This obviously increases the clip it takes to transcribe a podcast and it can also do for a very boring 'read'! Most of us don't speak in completely coherent sentences, so this be givens to be the least popular of the copy style options. A good halfway house is an Edited Transcript which is very utile for podcasts, particularly for ushers and lessons where the content is critical but perhaps the style or verbal oddities of the talker don't necessitate to be included. Any wrong grammar, non-standard English or errors are corrected and sentences are tidied up where it's sensible to make so.

Once you've decided on the type of copy you need, it may also be utile to see written text modern times – how long it will actually take to transcribe your podcast. The professional industry criterion lets one hr to transcribe 15 proceedings of clearly recorded speech. It therefore takes a lower limit of 4 hours to transcribe a 1 hr recording and sometimes as much as 6 hours depending on a figure of factors. These include how clear the recording is, if an external mike was used, the lucidity and velocity of the voices and the figure of people speaking, how coherently they talk and whether there are any hard accents, plus whether any background noise is intrusive or if there's any industry particular or technical nomenclature involved. Our sister article to this discusses in more than item what factors influence a clear podcast recording, and includes some tips to assist you do a clear recording.

1 comment:

Singapore Franchise Opportunity said...

Interesting posts, you've two additional reasons that i did not realise in my post:

http://www.futuregen.sg/business-process/podcast-transcription-for-greater-traffic/


That is:

1. The audio may not be clear, and the transcript allows one to follow the discussions.

2. It IS faster to read the transcripts than to listen to the audio..

I raise here another advantage of transcription over podcast: The compression factor: a one hour audio typically is anywhere between 40-50mb. The resulting transcription is about 150kb only!

This is important when you intent to reach as wide an audience as possible. In third world countries, the predominant form of access is still via dialup.