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Quality Spanish: Translation of Transcription

The original tape has on it what was said. The transcription is the transcriber's version of what was said, and the translation is the translator's idea of what that transcription means in English. It can be helpful to have a colleague check your work before you present it to your client. Your colleague must of course agree to keep the contents of the tape secret.


Irene King-Tomassini says that no two interpreters will agree totally on exactly what a tape says. Ideally a colleague can check to see if you have caught as much sound as possible, if you have heard the words correctly, and if you have translated them correctly. As to translation, there may be four or five versions of a translation that may differ and are all correct when compared with the source language. A second opinion may be especially helpful on tapes with poor sound quality such as police station interviews or body tapes. The goal is to retrieve 100% of the sound from a tape.


For any tape worth doing, one would hope to retrieve 80% to 100% of the sound, assuming there is no background noise. For less than 80% of the tape content, the result might be unconnected phrases so out of context that it might be difficult to extract meaning from those words that are audible. Before accept¬ing a tape assignment listen to the tape or tapes first, to determine their sound quality and duration. One sixty-minute tape could take days to transcribe. A simple rule of thumb is that one minute of recorded sound may require one hour to transcribe, translate, and check.


Where sound quality is poor you may perhaps surpass that limit. On a recent case one colleague listened to some wire-tap tapes and declined the assignment because the sound quality was so poor. It makes little sense to put a client to the expense of transcription and translation if the final result will satisfy no one. Only the interpreter involved can determine if a tape is worth working with. It is sometimes best to turn down work one sees no possibility of doing well.

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