Hi, I am interested in transcribing for castingwords on mechanicalturk... I have excellent hearing, am a fast typist, and am great in spelling and the English language. The only thing that concerns me here is the instructions dont seem to be 100% clear... I mean you click begin and right away the woman begins speaking. So I am assuming we just type out every word she speaks, but how do we format it? In continuous sentences or do we break it up into paragraphs when we deem appropriate? Also I am not sure what the [xx] is used for and when? It is when a piece of the audio is missing and we just plug that in, is that correct? Is there anything else I should know about how to do this? One other question, is there any amount to the amount of work or number of hits we are allowed to do? I would ideally like to prove myself and then move up the ladder fairly quickly and see if I can possibly earn a respectable monthly income from this, but at this time I do not know if this is possible. If anyone could answer these questions as well as give me any other information that would be helpful to a newbie, I would greatly appreciate it.
You need to find and probably print out the CW style guide - all of it: the basics guide, the what if guide and the grading examples. That will tell you exactly how CW requires things to be done. Each transcription requestor - CW, Redwood, Claritrans - has a DIFFERENT style guide and you will need to adapt to them. The best way, in my experience, is to print them out separately, keep them close by and re-read them each time you change requestors. Otherwise your grades will go down and so will any bonuses. It is well-worth it to get the style guides as well as a free copy of Express Scribe. There are lots of threads here with really good advice from other experienced transcribers and you'll be able to pick up a lot of useful tips! Welcome!
For your first ten active days, you are limited to accepting 100 HITs. After that, it's over 3,000 a day. That cap won't come into play if you're transcribing. CastingWords won't limit the number of HITs you attempt, to my knowledge. When you request qualification, you're given a PPT score of 80. Find audio that's available with that score and good luck. As stated already, print off and read the style guide. If you aren't able to follow the style guide, then all will be lost because your PPT score will drop below 80 - preventing you from working on any more of their HITs. This is the CastingWords area here in the forum. http://mturkforum.com/forumdisplay.php?15-Casting-Words You will find answers to most of your questions there. If something isn't clear, you can ask over there. Good luck.
You also need to only accept short and clear audio to begin with, preferably with one or two speakers. Sermons and lectures are best. This will make it easier while you learn the style guide. Make sure you download the free program Express Scribe. http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html You won't need a pedal to use it. Also transcribe into a word processor like MS-Word or the free processor OpenOffice http://www.openoffice.org/ Don't try to cut corners by using speech software, your work will be immediately rejected. You can learn a lot by looking over your edited transcripts on the CW website. http://turkers.castingwords.com/turkers/index Sometimes it takes 2 or 3 days for your edited work to show up here, so keep looking until it is posted. One of my pet peeves while grading is finding common words that are misspelled. Make sure that you SPELL CHECK your document before submitting. Also keep your sentences and paragraphs short, but not choppy. A lot of people talk in one long sentence for ten minutes. You need to learn how to break that down into sentences and paragraphs so that the transcription is easy to read. Don't be surprised if your PPT goes below 80 after you do a few transcripts. CW does this so they can manually look over your work and decide if you have potential or just a scammer. If your work is decent, they'll raise your PPT back up to 80. Good luck and hopefully you'll raise your PPT high enough that you can get into the better paying jobs in a short time.
If you happen to wonder over to SpeechInk they use UK English, so be careful. Try taking a small hit 30seconds - 1 minute. Plan for 3-4x the length of the audio at first when transcribing. Spell check, proof read your work!
Only for the home inspection audio or is it now that way for all of their work? I haven't done any work for them in a while.
You're right, Whimsy---the only SpeechInk transcriptions I've seen so far using British English are the home inspection ones. So when I do those, I've been making a point of asking myself two main questions right before submit (because I like those; it's an opportunity to do nonverbatim for SpeechInk!): do I have any instances of "color" that need to be "colour", and do any of these words need "ll" instead of "l" somewhere? Not that those are the only differences between UK and US spellings/usage; they're just the ones that I seem to most need to remind myself about. And I could say more (all good) about SpeechInk, but since this is a CW thread, I'll stop here! CW's great too, though. As a new transcriber, I've been very happy with their feedback process. And it's nice that just about everything is nonverbatim.