Editing and Transcription Services
You’ve got to understand!
How important is the quality of editing provided by transcription services? Pretty important! In Part 6 of the tale of the Feynman Lectures, you’ll hear how editing can sometimes make or break the success of a transcript. Brought to you by Tigerfish Transcribing, providers of video transcription services, academic transcribing services, transcription services NYC, transcription SF, transcription Seattle, transcription Chicago, legal transcription services, and all around best editing and transcription services .
Famous Transcripts in History: The Feynman Lectures
Editing and transcription are so closely related, it is hard to separate them. That’s why a good transcription service also has to do great editing. Here’s how it works:
On with the story of the Feynman Lectures. When we left off, our heroes had some beautiful and accurate transcripts of the mesmerizing lectures by Dr. Feynman. All’s well that ends well, right?
Not so fast! In the interview transcript in Feynman’s Tips on Physics, Robert Leighton goes on:
“But about six or eight lectures went by and nothing usable came out the other end. The transcript was verbatim, and in this case verbatim is bad–because Feynman never says anything once: he says it at least two-and-a-half, if not three-and-a-half or four times–and he puts it a different way each time. Then he’ll go on to the next topic…and he’ll still be thinking about whether he could have explained his earlier topic better, and then he comes back…[Editing] was a full time job; you couldn’t present the material successfully without paying very careful attention to it.”
At first the task of editing was given to graduate students, but they were too slow, according to author Matt Sands, and also did not always fully understand the material and ended up ‘editing’ it to mean something different and reflect their own ideas, not Feynman’s. Instead, Sands himself and a number of other faculty members took over the responsibility for editing.
Once they had the right people on the job, they were able to transcribe, edit, and print the lectures within weeks, and provide the hungry students with much-needed study notes.
Other physicists heard about the Lectures, and were soon requesting copies of the edited transcripts. Before long, a book was in the works.
Don’t miss Part 7, where more secrets of editing are revealed!
Ellen Park
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