Converting Audio recordings of meetings, podcasts, video conferences and interviews into text or audio transcription comes with many benefits. It enhances access to the content, helps you quickly find specific information using keywords, allows for knowledge sharing, boosts SEO, the list goes on. Whether you attempt the task on your own, use automatic speech recognition (ASR), or rely on an audio transcription service, you need to ensure content that is free of grammatical errors. Good grammar is key to successful communication. Documents that are grammatically incorrect may lead to misinterpretation, and even lead to taking the wrong decision or action.

Here Are the Main Grammatical Errors to Watch Out For When Transcribing Audio

• Punctuation: When transcribing dialogue, proper punctuation ensures readability and clarity, and helps convey the meaning of what was said. In a transcript, the reader needs to recognize where each sentence begins and ends, and where how the speaker said things. A comma indicates a pause or separate ideas in a sentence, and a period or full point ends a sentence.

ASR can fail when it comes to punctuation. Take this spoken sentence that was transcribed by Speechmatics’ ASR from a radio news broadcast (sppechmatics.com).

“if the weather cooperates as they hope crews might be able to start talking about letting people back into their homes today”

Adding capitalization and punctuation can make a huge difference to readability:

“If the weather cooperates, as they hope, crews might be able to start talking about letting people back into their homes today.”

Other punctuation marks have their own roles in conveying meaning and expressions. They helps set the tone and mood, and are useful to communicate emotions like anger or sarcasm, which cannot be expressed using only words.

Another example where wrongly placed punctuation can prove very costly is with numbers, for instance, entering 123,765 as 123, 765.

• Apostrophes: Wrong placement of apostrophes is a common mistake. Knowing how to distinguish between possessive forms (‘s) and plural forms (s) is the key to using apostrophes correctly:
  • ‘s (apostrophe s) is the possessive form in singular nouns, e.g., airplane’s wings
  • s’ (s apostrophe), which denotes possession in plural nouns, e.g., airplanes’ wings

  Apostrophes are also used in contracted words such as ‘haven’t’ in place of ‘have not’. However, transcriptionists providing research transcription services also know that contractions are not acceptable in academic writing. In fact, the full forms of all words are used any formal or professional writing.

• Similar sounding words or homophones: ‘There’, ‘Their’ and ‘They’re’ are a common example of words that sound similar.

  “There” refers to a place, for e.g., “Over there” and ‘Their” means that something belongs to someone – “their car”. “They’re” is the shortened form of “They are”.

  Other examples of homophones:

  • Wear and where
  • Loose and lose
  • Knot and not
  • To, two, and too
  • Brake and break
  • You’re and your
  • Aid and aide
  • Weather and whether

Teams in general transcription companies take care to type out homophones correctly and know how to use all such words in the right context.

• Conjunctions: “So”, “or”, “but”, “and” and “because” are conjunctions that are commonly used in dialogue. The right way to use conjunctions is to connect words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. Avoid starting a sentence with a conjunction, unless not using it will change the meaning.

• Spelling: Spelling mistakes can occur due to fast typing, when you hit the wrong key and don’t realize it. Wrong spelling can lead to information being entered incorrectly, which can change the complete meaning of the sentence. Your spellchecker would miss mistakes referred to as atomic typos that have a completely different meaning from the one in the audio file. For e.g., if you type ‘there’ instead of ‘their’, the error would go unnoticed unless you carefully read through the transcript. Atomic typos can also include omitting a letter entirely. For example, omitting the letter r in ‘string’ will make it ‘sting’.

• Specific words: Knowing the meanings of words is also crucial to ensure correct transcription. Examples of words that tend to be confused and cause grammatical errors include
  • Assure/Ensure
  • Affect/Effect
  • Farther/Further
  • Any way/Anyway
  • Allusion/Illusion
  • Appraise/Apprise
  • Capital/Capitol
  • Elicit/Illicit
  • Principle/Principal
  • Ensure/Insure

Recognizing the particular differences between different words is crucial to avoid errors in audio transcription.

• Tense: Using the correct tense in the transcript is important. As we know, the present tenses refer to something in the present. In the transcript, sounds that the speaker makes are given in the present tense: laughs, claps, snaps fingers, scoffs, phone rings, etc. The past tense should be used to indicate that something has happened and is over, and future tense to indicate something that has not yet happened or a state that does not yet exist. Using the wrong tense is a major mistake.

Now that we have discussed the common grammatical errors that can occur during audio transcription, here are some tips to avoid them:

• Use good audio equipment: Many errors can occur because of poor audio. Investing in a high-quality microphone and other audio equipment can ensure clarity in the recording and reduce risk of transcription mistakes.
• Double check or proofread the document before they are finalized. Recommended strategies to catch spelling mistakes include reading the transcript aloud or reading it backward.
• Use a quality writing aid. The right tool can help you identify mistakes as you transcribe. For instance, Grammarly highlights errors in red and makes suggestions for corrections. This plug-in can help you create accurate transcripts in quick turnaround time.
• Turn off autocorrect. Predictive text can be very useful for correcting typos or working out what you want to say next. However, autocorrect will not recognize certain errors and can mistakenly correct you. When using your phone or computer for voice recording, disabling autocorrect will prevent it from changing the exact thing you want to say.

One of the best ways to ensure quality audio transcription is to outsource the task to experts. A professional online transcription company will have skilled transcriptionists with proper language skills and multi-tier quality control processes in place. They can transcribe your audio recordings correctly, and also review and edit ASR generated documents to provide high-quality transcripts.