A transcription service in linguistic sense is the written representation of language. The source can either be sign language or speech or existing written format in different writing system. Translation is not the similar way of transcription as far as linguistic sense is considered. I.e. Translation is just representing the source language meaning to a targeted language, for example, translation from Spanish to English.

In the academic stream of linguistics, transcription is an inevitable part of methods like conversation analysis, phonetics, sociolinguistics and dialectology. Wide ranges of common examples of non-medical transcription services include proceedings of criminal trial report by court reporter or medical professionals recorded voice note (healthcare transcription services or medical transcription services).

Here, we are going to deal with linguistics transcription.

Orthographic transcription and Phonetics

Linguistic transcription can be divided into Orthographic transcription and phonetic transcription. Orthographic transcription comprises of rule of fixing the spoken words into written types as directed by the orthography of a particular given language whereas, Phonetic transcription mainly focuses on phonological functions and phonetics of language which is being spoken. Thus it tells the rule of fixing or mapping particular individual phones or sounds to symbols that are being written and it uses International Phonetic Alphabet.

The type of transcription (Healthcare Transcription Services or non-medical transcription) to choose depends on the research interests gained. In scientific sense, phonetics transcription is undoubtly systemic.

Transcription-A theoretical approach

Fixing or mapping spoken language into writer format of symbols is definitely not an easy and straightforward way as in the first glance. Written language which is ideal one comprised of a clearly discrete and distinct symbols. On the other hand, spoken language which is a continuous process comprised of number of components with no limits. There is no prior system for classifying and distinguishing the components and thus no predetermined way of mapping the components to symbols of written format.

System of transcription

The transcription systems are a set of rules that tells how spoken language should be represented in symbols of written language. Mostly, the phonetic transcription features are based on International Phonetic Alphabet. Orthographic transcription systems can be explained with some examples like:

Conversation Analysis

It comprises many approaches that are distinct and types of transcription conventions. For conversion analysis, data that is recorded is transcribed to a written format that is acceptable to analysts. Mainly, two approaches are there for conventional analysis. They are narrow transcription and broad transcription.

Discourse Transcription

Type of transcription used for Santa Barbara Spoken American English (SBCSAE) and further developed to DT2.

GAT

It is conversion transcription analytic system mainly used in German speaking countries for conversion analytics and linguistics which are more interactive.

Transcription software

As a conventional process, transcription was carried out manually with paper and pen with the usage of stored recorded sound. For example: compact cassette. But nowadays, transcription is merely done on computers with digital audio and video files and the transcriptions are electronic data of information. To assist the transcriber to create digital transcription many tools are being used in transcription. Some of them are:

• CLAN
• ANVIL
• ELAN
• EXMARaLDA
• f4transkript
• FOLKER
• Praat
• Transcriber
• Voxcribe