About transcription rate Thread poster: Eun Byul Shin
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Eun Byul Shin
South Korea
Local time: 23:40
English to Korean
+ ...
Hi,
I'm a newbie who just started working as a freelancer for an international subtitle translation company for streaming services. Recently I've received an email from a company that offered me to work as a transcriptionist for a 100-hr healthcare video and they said their budget is 28 USD/hr (I believe this is an audio hour)
I am unsure whether this rate is a sufficient amount compared to the average rate
Never done a transcription job before and so I ha... See more Hi,
I'm a newbie who just started working as a freelancer for an international subtitle translation company for streaming services. Recently I've received an email from a company that offered me to work as a transcriptionist for a 100-hr healthcare video and they said their budget is 28 USD/hr (I believe this is an audio hour)
I am unsure whether this rate is a sufficient amount compared to the average rate
Never done a transcription job before and so I have no idea if I should be taking this job or not. Wondering if anyone could give an idea ???
[Edited at 2020-04-06 15:29 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Sheila Wilson 
Spain
Local time: 15:40
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
| Ideas for monolingual transcription rates | Apr 6, 2020 |
Eun Byul Shin wrote:
Recently I've received an email from a company that offered me to work as a transcriptionist for a 100-hr healthcare video and they said their budget is 28 USD/hr (I believe this is an audio hour)
Never done a transcription job before and so I have no idea if I should be taking this job or not. Wondering if anyone could give an idea ???
100 hours??? That really isn't something to cut your teeth on! That's an enormous job!
Firstly, I'm assuming you're doing transcription ONLY, e.g. Korean audio to Korean text. Any translation of the transcript would have to be invoiced on top. That's normally charged at your normal per-word rate. But of course you won't know what the word count is until you've done the transcription. I'm also assuming that very few "extras" will be needed. The requirements for including speakers' names can make for added complications, and every time-stamp takes time. Also, if absolutely everything you hear has to be included, the time needed goes up and up -- I'm thinking about noting any background noise, movements, utterances that were unintended (stuttering, false starts, "hmms", clearing the throat...), etc.
I've only ever done "normal" transcriptions: transcribing everything the speaker intended to say, labelled as "Speaker A" etc and with minimal time-stamps. I normally reckon on being able to process 1 minute of audio in anything from 4 to 10 minutes. That covers the initial listening/typing exercise and then listening again to check that it's all correct and to format the text correctly with sensible punctuation, paragraphs, etc. The volume of text produced in a minute of audio is of course variable. The quality of the audio is also very variable, and can vary dramatically from one part of the file to another. It can be a really thankless task. I offered it for a year or two and then stopped. Although USD 28/hr wasn't too far below my normal hourly rate, for an audio hour I'd have wanted very many times that -- more like USD 200 per audio hour! Do you think they'd be willing to pay you USD 20K?
Please take my advice: Find some audio and set about transcribing it -- for free. Work on a sample of a set duration, maybe 10 minutes and see how long it takes you to do the first run-through. Alternatively, transcribe for a set time, maybe an hour and note how many minutes of audio you've transcribed. Whichever way you do it, you should end up being able to calculate your audio minutes transcribed -- roughly -- per hour of work. Now you need to amend your calculation to factor in listening to the audio again and checking that it's of deliverable standard. However, if the audio was straightforward AND the client ONLY wants to receive the translation, rather than the transcript too, then you may be able to skip this step.
Once you've done that exercise, you'll have a lot more idea of rates. You'll also have more of an idea of the scope of this job and whether you actually want to do it! And you'll also gain some proficiency in whatever transcription software you're using.
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