How to Transcribe Interviews

Conducting an interview, coming up with good questions and establishing a rapport, is a challenging process. Transcribing that interview can also be difficult, and requires precise listening skills, patience, and careful editing. An hour-long interview can easily take 4 to 6 hours to transcribe, depending on how fast you type. Make sure you allow enough time to transcribe interviews accurately, and maintain the tone and quality of the original audio.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Tape player, preferably with headphones and foot pedal
• Computer with word processing software
• Notepad

1. Start tape. Use foot pedal to stop and start tape. You can use a regular tape player, but keep in mind that it will take much longer. Use the pause button to stop the tape exactly where you need to.

2. Start typing as soon as the tape starts. You won't be able to type as fast as people speak (even professional court reporters use shorthand), so you'll have to stop the tape each time you fall behind. Use whatever technique works best for you. You may want to listen first to a sentence, then pause the tape and type it. Accuracy is the most important thing. The better you get it in the first pass, the less editing you'll have to do. (See Tips Section.)

3. If a passage is difficult to decipher, listen to it twice more. If you're still having trouble, make note of the counter number on the recorder and go back to it later. Sometimes the context of an interview will help you interpret that section later.

4. Transcribe the interview exactly as you hear it. There will be time later to edit grammar and content.

5. Abbreviate speaker's names to the first or first 2 initials, with a colon following. (e.g. V: What other voice work have you done? C: I've done two radio and one TV commercial.)

6. Type in block paragraph format, putting a space in between each speaker. You can edit into more paragraphs for the final copy.

7. When finished typing initial draft, listen to the tape again. At the same time, read along with what you've written. The print should match exactly. Make corrections as necessary.

8. If necessary, return to problem areas you've noted that weren't repaired during the second play of the tape. If the dialogue is impossible to decipher, and the answer is an important fact or comment, do your best to verify the information with the original speaker.

9. If unable to verify, put your best guess in brackets in the final copy, to show that it's your text, not the original source's. Use whatever guidelines your editor has for these situations; some will add an editor's note. If the missing words aren't important, edit the answer out of the final copy, or add ellipses to the preceding part of the response to show that more was there, but was edited out.

10. Begin edit of text. Spell out abbreviations and clean up punctuation.

11. Edit out patterns of speech or filler (such as "um", "uh", "like") that detract from the message of the interview, especially for factual interviews. If it's a personality piece, where the person's vocal style is important, leave in more of these patterns. See Warnings Section.

12. Insert extra paragraph breaks if a response is particularly long. Check spelling.

13. The interview is now ready for publication, or for integrating into a fuller piece. Depending on where the item will be published, only samples of the full interview may be used, or biographical information can be woven into the text of the interview to add context.

Tips & Warnings

• If you are transcribing an interview that someone else conducted, it's important to familiarize yourself with the subject's style and the context of the interview. Listen to at least a good portion of the interview first, before any typing, to prepare yourself.
• When typing up the interview, to add clarity, you can add some clues to the tone of the interview in brackets, (e.g. [laughs], [points at bandmate]). Add these in either the first draft, or in the second edit when re-listening to the tape.
• Editing is a tricky balancing act. A few simple edits can totally change the tone of a piece, so it's important to remain as true to the interview subject as possible. Only edit out filler words and simple grammar mistakes that happen during speech. If the subject's answer is ambiguous, don't try to clarify. Let the reader judge for themselves what they meant. If you have an opinion, express it in accompanying text, not by altering the interviewee's words.
• Words are harsher in print, so editing of filler and adding context afterwards can help present your subject in the correct light. Read over the final copy and make sure that your interview subject doesn't end up sounding more extreme or less articulate than they are in real life.

Resources

• Purchase a transcriber/recorder at Amazon.
• Read an oral historian's thoughts on how much to edit an interview.

[ninevoltheart]

on 11/20/2009 What a great article, thank you! My question is: How do you abbreviate the speakers' names if they have the same initials? I have a BD and a BD and I'm not sure what to do here!

[tiffownsthis]

on 11/18/2009 Great tips. From my experience transcribing documentary interviews, I've found that you want to also we the specifications of the person that's hired you. A lot of times they want things exactly as they were said, including all the "ums" and "ahs."

If you're lucky enough to be using a digital file to transcribe from, there's plenty of software you can use to slow the file down so that you can type it up in real time (depending on how fast you type), which makes it easier.