This article was written in 2016. It might or it might not be outdated. And it could be that the layout breaks. If that’s the case please let me know.

The right kind of transcripts

I asked on my blog what kind of transcripts I should use for my podcast: wordly transcripts that leave out certain expletives but don’t correct grammatical errors, literal transcripts that write down every word, including uhms and errrs, or a summary in which grammatical errors are corrected. Most reactions were from people who don’t really need a transcript, but who like them. Some of these people didn’t like the wordly transcripts. They find them confusing. After a bit of thinking I decided to ignore these people because of the fantastic Priority of Constituencies principle, which in this particular case would be:

In case of conflict, consider people who need it over people who like it over people who have thought about it over people with an opinion.

There were two reactions that made it clear to me that a wordly transcript is the right one for my case. The first one is about content. You don’t want to serve different content to different people. In a summary some details might get lost. The second reaction is less theoretical. It turns out there are people with Auditory Processing Disorder, who like to listen and read at the same time in order to understand things better. If you provide a summary, in which spoken language is translated to written language, it suddenly becomes harder to understand, since the thing you hear is different from what you read. And the third and final reaction came from my father, who is almost completely deaf, who really enjoyed reading the transcripts: It’s like hearing you talk!

If you have a different, well considered opinion about this, please let me know.