Pricing

We aim to offer a fairly-priced service.

Our base rate is £1.28 per minute of audio. However, we may make additional charges depending on the quality of audio, number of speakers, etc. We go into some of these below. If you email us with a sample of your audio we can give you an accurate quote.

We also offer proofreading for grammar, clarity and English language usage.  Specialist services such as video subtitling, live captioning or audio reading of printed documents may be available at additional cost.

We may be able to offer discounted rates for students and for community projects whose aims we support.

If you want to discuss a piece of work, get a quote, or talk about our other services, please email us at typeology.coop@gmail.com .

Factors which may affect pricing
We’re happy to provide quotes in advance of receiving work, but the more information about the job we have in advance the more accurate the quote is likely to be. As such, we ask clients to tell us as much as possible in advance about factors which may affect the amount of time it will take us to complete their transcription job. In order to pay our workers a decent wage for the work they do, we charge variable rates depending on the difficulty of the audio we transcribe.

Our standard rate for one-to-one interviews with good quality audio and no other particular complicating factors is £1.28 per audio minute. However, it’s not unusual for there to be complicating factors, which covers anything that might reasonably be assumed to make transcription take longer.

Below are details of some of the more common complicating factors we encounter. This list isn’t exhaustive, though, and we’d really like to know about anything else in your recordings which you feel might impact on how long the transcription takes.

• Multiple speakers: The basic price is based on a one-to-one interview. As soon as you start to add additional speakers, this makes transcribing more complicated. First of all, adding a third person generally makes an interview far more conversational, and tends to make it have more interruptions and people speaking over each other, which affect turnaround time. In larger groups (like focus groups, for example) this brings additional complications. On a recording with several people who may at times be speaking over each other, it becomes harder for the typist to track who is speaking at any moment, and a large group makes it much more likely that somebody’s speech will be difficult to make out – because they are far from the recording device, for example.
• Audio Quality: There might be factors that affect how audible your recording is. This might include the fidelity of the recording itself (say if the audio is scratchy or tinny), any distracting background noise, the speaker’s voice being quiet (for example, if they are far away from the mic) and interference or network issues such as you might get when conducting a telephone or video interview.
• Strong Accents: A speaker with a strongly accented voice might make it harder for a transcriber to decipher and tends to take a bit longer.  A recording with more than one different accent adds to the difficulty. This doesn’t just cover regional accents or speakers of English as a second language: some upper-class accents can be just as hard to make out as regional working-class ones, for instance.
• Verbatim Level: Like most transcription agencies, as a standard we transcribe using a method known as ‘intelligent verbatim’. This approach balances capturing accurately what was said with the readability of the document. As such, whilst our transcriptions are fairly accurate reflections of what was said, we usually omit ums and ahs, false starts to sentences and filler words such as ‘kind of’, ‘sort of’, ‘like’, and ‘you know’, unless they contribute to the meaning of what is being said. Some researchers (for example, researchers using discourse analysis), prefer to have more or indeed all of these parts of speech included. Strict verbatim takes our typists longer, and as such we charge more for this, dependent on the requirements of the researcher.
• Field-Specific Terminology: Whilst all interviews will contain some degree of field-specific language, if your research is going to involve a great deal of complex terminology it may take us longer to complete the transcript. One way to mitigate the extra time required (and therefore the additional cost) is to furnish us with a glossary of relevant terminology before the work commences.