Hansard and Legislative Transcription Editing and Proofreading Services

Hansard occupies a strange position among written records: it is not a transcript and it is not a summary. The convention in most parliaments is that it is substantially verbatim — the words spoken, with repetitions, false starts and obvious slips removed, and nothing added. Getting that boundary right is the whole craft. Edit too little and the record is unreadable; edit too much and you have improved a member's argument, which is precisely what the record must never do, because it is cited in courts, quoted in campaigns and relied on to establish legislative intent.

We edit what parliamentary reporting and transcription services produce — chamber and committee transcripts, style guides and editorial conventions for reporting staff, training material for new reporters and editors, conventions for handling interjections, points of order and rulings, guidance on rendering names, titles and constituencies, indexing and subject classification standards, correction and erratum procedures, guidance on quotations, tabled documents and incorporated material, transcription conventions for evidence given in committee, standards for rendering testimony delivered through interpretation, accessibility and captioning standards, and public-facing explanations of what Hansard is and is not. Our editors are conscious that the conventions differ between jurisdictions and work to yours.

The line between permissible and impermissible editing is where a reporting service either has a defensible standard or a collection of individual habits. A member who says "the, the figure is — well, it was around fourteen, fourteen per cent" should appear as saying the figure was around fourteen per cent. A member who misstates a number, uses the wrong minister's title, or makes an argument that does not parse should appear as having done so. We help services write conventions that state this boundary in operable terms — what is removed as disfluency, what is retained as substance, how an obvious slip of the tongue is handled and whether it is footnoted, what is done when a member's correction arrives afterwards, and how interjections are attributed when the microphone did not capture the speaker. Written down properly, these conventions produce consistency across dozens of reporters; left to judgement, they produce a record that reads differently depending on who was in the booth.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including material before publication and committee evidence taken in camera. We are editors rather than parliamentary officials, and we offer no view on procedure, privilege or the content of proceedings. What we can do is help you write conventions your team can apply consistently, and edit the guidance and training material that carry them.