Transcription Services Editing and Proofreading Services

Two suppliers quote for the same audio, one at eighty pence a minute and one at two pounds forty. The client takes the cheaper, receives a clean readable document, and only later discovers that the researcher needed every false start and hesitation, that the three speakers are labelled Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and Speaker 3 with no way of telling which is which, and that nothing is timestamped. Neither supplier did anything wrong. There was no specification.

We edit what transcription providers produce — service specifications and style sheets, verbatim level definitions and worked examples, speaker identification and labelling conventions, timestamping and formatting standards, quality assurance and proofing procedures, turnaround and pricing structures, audio quality guidance for clients, confidentiality and data handling documentation, research, legal and medical transcription protocols, transcriber guidance and training material, machine transcription and post-editing procedures, and client onboarding and template documentation. Our editors work on the specification that makes a quote mean something.

The spec sheet is the entire product in this business, and the four decisions it must settle are the ones clients do not know they are making. We write these so the verbatim level is defined by example rather than by adjective — intelligent verbatim showing exactly what is removed, with a sample paragraph in each level so a client can see the difference between a clean read and a discourse analyst's requirement; so speaker identification states how speakers are named, what happens when a voice is unidentifiable, and how overlapping speech is marked, since a focus group transcript with unresolvable attribution is worthless to the researcher who commissioned it; so timestamping specifies interval or event, at what granularity, and whether it sits inline or in a margin, because retrofitting timestamps costs more than the original transcription; so turnaround is expressed against audio duration and stated business hours with the surcharge structure visible; and so the sheet names what affects both price and accuracy from the client's side — recording quality, background noise, accents, technical vocabulary supplied in advance — as a supplier given a term list produces a materially better document. Specifications written this way stop clients buying the wrong thing and stop suppliers being blamed for it.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including recordings, transcripts and client material. We are editors rather than transcription or research practitioners, and we offer no view on methodology, accuracy standards or data handling obligations. What we can do is make the specification settle the four decisions before the audio arrives.