How to Transcribe Interviews

A good headset is a must for this type of work.

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 four to six hours to transcribe, depending on how fast you type. Make sure you allow enough time to transcribe interviews accurately, and maintain the tone and integrity of the original audio.

Difficulty:

Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Tape player, preferably with headphones and foot pedal
• Notepad

1. Start the tape. Use the foot pedal to stop and restart it as you work. You can use a regular tape player and simply hit pause to stop the tape, but keep in mind that the process will take much longer this way, and be more tedious.

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 cleaner your transcript in the first pass, the less editing you'll have to do.

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 speakers' names to the first or first two initials, with a colon following. For example, "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 these blocks into more paragraphs for the final copy.

7. When you've 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. Return to problem areas you 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, contact the speaker to verify the information.

9. For any text you are unable to verify, put your best guess in brackets in the final copy; this indicates 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 it was edited out.

10. Begin editing the text. Spell out abbreviations and clean up punctuation.

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

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

    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 a good portion of the interview first, before attempting to transcribe it.

• 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]).

• 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 occur in casual speech. If the subject's answer is ambiguous, don't try to clarify. Let the readers judge for themselves what was meant.

• 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.

References

• "The Art of the Author Interview"; Sarah Anne Johnson