TRANSCRIPTION
1. Forensic (including "disputed utterances")
Transcripts can be made of recorded events, and presented in a written form to assist judge, counsel and jury to follow these events.
AudioLex has special expertise in the transcription of "difficult" recordings - particularly poor quality covert surveillance recordings - and can utilise a number of methods to improve the clarity of recorded utterances and other sounds.
We do not use the term "verbatim", but rather the term "optimum". An "optimum" transcript is that which can reasonably be achieved in the time allotted. All transcripts will benefit from unlimited time but this is rarely a practical consideration.
Our practice is to make it perfectly clear which areas of the completed transcript are probable or possible, rather than verbatim wordings.
Examples of "straightforward" transcripts include most Police interviews, conference papers, speeches, and some business meetings.
Examples of "moderate" transcripts include many 000 calls, messages left on telephone answering machines, clearly recorded meetings or conversations involving 2 or 3 participants, and some strong-dialect, speaker-impaired or non-native speaker recordings.
Examples of "difficult" transcripts include many of those recorded by a concealed (covert) device, such as a vehicle, premises or body-recorder, recordings of telephone conversations by devices other than wire taps or dictaphone-type recorders, very noisy recordings, and the speech of a distressed, injured or drunk speaker.
Our methods include "close listening" on high fidelity equipment, loop playbacks, filtering and "binaural listening" techniques. Wherever possible, notice is also taken of the phonetic and phonological, syntactic, pragmatic, lexical and dialectal strategies used by the speaker. Frequency measurements (electronic acoustic analysis) can also be of use; in this example there was a requirement to distinguish between the words "I" and "we":
NOTE: Poor quality surveillance recordings should be submitted for screening and estimate.
2. Legal and Business
We can also undertake the transcription of legal and business recordings (such as Police interviews, meetings and conferences).
3. Noise analysis
Acoustic events recorded on a tape may contain vital information as to the circumstances of an offence or other situation.
Similarly, examination of an audio recording may reveal aspects of timing or chronology
Recordings for transcription:
Recordings can be emailed, posted, couriered
or hand-delivered to us. Highly sensitive work
can also sometimes be collected, or carried out on site.