Amazing Transcription Facts
Transcriptionists work hard, and they work diligently. The amazing facts are that their fingers are flying to keep up with your speach, which is in essance, just slightly over half as fast as you can talk.
Get this… the normal human speaks English at approximately 140 words per minute. Most typists clock their skills in at about 60-70 words per minute. Some may be lucky to exceed that but what we are not taking into consideration is the characters that we don’t use in speech. Periods, question marks, quotes, and so much more. These can add up as well.
Most words used are averaged at 4.5 characters per word, that multiplied by the 140 words per minute in speech equals at whopping 630 characters per minute. Figure into that all the characters that typists need to include to make your projects English compliant (approximately 150 extra characters) and you will see 780 characters per minute that your transcriber puts to paper/computer screen.
Now, transcriptionists will type about 60 wpm and multiply that times the average length of a word at 4.5 and we see only a character amount of 270. This doesn’t include the punctuation which might equal around 50 extra characters in that. A total of 330 characters.
The ratio now is more than double of the spoken word vs the written word for each piece of audio we get. A normal transcriptionist will count on spending more than 2 minutes on each minute of transcription. Remember that next time you have a job that requires a quick turn around, your transcriber will appreciate it!
Tags: punctuation, spoken word, transcriber, transcription, transcriptionist, words per minute