TypeOlogy member Howard David Ingham tackles one of our most frequently asked frequently asked questions…
If you’ve been through the TypeOlogy site and read our FAQ (and obviously you’ve read our FAQ), you will have seen some of the variables that affect the pricing of the transcriptions we do. A large number of speakers, for example, or a poor quality sound file will influence the cost of work, as you might expect. The one that has inspired the most conversation among our clients, freelancers and members, however, is the presence of speakers with accents that are difficult to parse.
That’s not surprising! It’s the one that needs the most explanation. And it’s honestly the one that we’ve had to think the hardest about.
OK, it’s a simple enough principle to begin with: if the typist struggles with the accent of the person talking, they’re going to find it harder to finish the transcript and it’s going to take them longer. And they need to be compensated fairly for their time.
But wait. Isn’t that a bit… discriminatory?
This is the part where I say, “Yeah, maybe?”
It’s a sticky question, because we have to admit that accents aren’t just a neutral characteristic of a person’s speech, they’re also a marker of nationality, social class, ethnic identity and other things. Generally, people who are told that they have impenetrable accents tend to be poor and/or non-white and/or not a first-language English speaker. Sometimes those accents place them in a community, supply them with an identity.
Accents are often used as a way to exclude people, and accusing a person of impenetrability can be a bad-faith way to make their lives more difficult. I’m reminded of my own experience here, of how as a teenager I expunged my regional accent to hide the fact that I was from a deprived social background, and to reduce the flak I kept getting from my significantly more privileged peers. Years later I would return to my hometown and find that local people I met were unable to believe that I was born there. In losing my accent, I lost my identity. In some ways, I deprived myself of a home.
Another way that people with strong local/ethnic/working-class accents get punished is how they get gatekept out of things, because people in the “default” don’t understand them, aren’t willing to go to the extra effort of understanding them, or penalise them for going to that effort.
And the thing about marginalised identities – and one of the lovely things about working for TypeOlogy is how we primarily employ people with marginalised identities – is that having one doesn’t stop you being prejudiced against other people. You don’t get points for your own experience of marginalisation (no matter what the DWP might think).
As an organisation committed to those co-operative principles of equity, equality, honesty, openness and social responsibility, we have to grapple with this question. And in the last couple of months, we’ve talked about it quite a bit.
The accents people give a pass to (and why we don’t)
One really important thing to note is that quite a few people we’ve transcribed who our typists have found a bit hard to parse don’t have the sort of accent that is normally counted as marginalised. It’s just that no one notices when someone is hard to understand and they’re wealthy. Upper-class British accents are a classic example of this. Hardly anyone ever calls out members of the aristocracy for being really hard to understand. This is because they’re rich and powerful.
But does the size of a person’s hedge fund really make it easier to transcribe someone? No. No, it does not. We’ve had transcripts like that, and we have charged the increased rate for them, because they’re still harder to listen to.
(Yes, if you’re old enough to remember The Fast Show, that means you’re as old as me and I’m sorry)
Wait a minute, though, who’s actually getting discriminated against?
The thing about a discriminatory act is that it’s directional, an action performed against a person. But most of the time, if not all of the time, we’re not hired by the interviewees. We’re being paid by the interviewers (or the institutions they work for) and often they’re not the ones with the difficult-to-parse accents. We’re simply given a file to transcribe, which we do, and then we invoice the client or the client’s institution, and that invoice depends on the difficulty of the work done. We’re not communicating with the interviewees most of the time.
This brings up the point that our commitment to equity also translates into a commitment to compensating our typists for their work. Our typists, both members and freelancers, really do put in the effort to understand, and to provide the best and most accurate transcripts a professional can.
Occasionally, we all receive a file that for whatever reason we have to work harder to interpret. And the key is working harder. Our typists have a commitment to come to the work we do with no presuppositions as to who’s talking, but if it’s taking longer, we’re going to pay them more.
And then there’s experience
Now a lot of this is down to the typist. Some of our typists find some accents a lot easier to handle than others, simply due to personal experience.
For instance, I’ve spent years living with international students, so I don’t particularly struggle with the accents of speakers from South and East Asia or central Africa. Unlike everyone else in the co-operative, however, I’ve never lived north of Swansea, so I struggle a bit with English accents from anywhere North of Birmingham, while most of my colleagues hear those pretty much every day. Other members of the co-op have a bit of a time handling accents from Wales (not a problem for me, obviously), and have much less trouble than me with, for example, American or European accents.
This is important for us to know and communicate with each other. Part of our conversation going forward has led us to now have documentation of who finds what accents easiest to transcribe, which means we can assign work effectively and more efficiently, according to everyone’s strengths.
Doing better
We will carry on trying to do better, and it’s a conversation we’re keen to continue. We’re always ready to talk about our rates, and we are willing to negotiate them, particularly if a project aligns with our ethical stance. For the time being, though, we charge for difficult to understand accents for the simple reason that our typists work harder to transcribe them. They do everything they can to make sure our clients’ interviewees are fairly represented in text. We return the favour by paying them fairly for their work.
TypeOlogy transcription cooperative 