Forensic Transcription Services

English and Spanish Forensic Transcription Available

Forensic transcription of marginally intelligible speech is available for both English-language recordings and Spanish-language recordings. We have both English- and Spanish-speaking forensic linguists with advanced degrees in phonetics and linguistics who can work on your project.

We can handle many causes of marginally intelligible speech:

background noises          overlapping speech          distant speakers          quiet speech

slurred speech        excited children        heavy accents        rapid speech

speech impediments          electrical interference          poor quality equipment          poor recording methods

What is Forensic Transcription?

The term “forensic transcription” can be used to refer to the transcription of anything evidentiary in nature. It may be a phone call, suspect interrogation, witness statement, undercover recording, voicemail, or many other things. The speech itself may be clear or very difficult to understand.

Other times the term “forensic transcription” is used when referring to the scientific process of decoding difficult-to-understand speech. This second definition is what this webpage is all about.

If you have a recording with marginally intelligible speech, you have come to the right place. Our forensic transcription projects aren’t assigned to traditional transcriptionists, which is what you’ll find at most companies claiming to offer forensic transcription services. Our forensic transcription projects aren’t even assigned to forensic audio engineers with some knowledge of phonetics, which is what you’ll find at most of the rest of the companies.

Forensic Linguists and Speech Scientists

If you have a recording that is difficult to understand, we will assign it to a forensic linguist or a speech scientist (depending on why it’s difficult). These professionals have a solid background in phonetics, linguistics, and/or speech pathology. They don’t just listen closely over and over to a particular utterance. They also consider the lexical, phonetic, pragmatic, syntactic, and other characteristics and patterns of a person’s speech.

Additionally, they may conduct an acoustic analysis of the disputed or indistinct words. To do this, they use a spectrogram, which is a visual representation of a speech waveform.

Spectrogram of the words "I shot him."

Disputed Transcripts / Disputed Utterances

If you have a transcript that you believe is incorrect, a forensic linguist can examine it for errors. It's not enough to just have another regular transcriptionist give it a listen. All he can do is state that he listened carefully and typed what he was sure he heard. Instead, a forensic linguist can conduct phonetic and acoustic analyses of the recording and has the credentials to back up his conclusions.

Call or Email Us Today
(509) 413-3448
info@Textphonic.com

Audio Enhancement

The truth be told, audio enhancement alone won’t often help you with marginally intelligible speech recordings. Enhancement techniques can be successful when the speech of your recording is masked by a noise that doesn’t share its frequencies. However, it’s more likely that competing noises in your recording share a significant portion of frequencies with the speech. In such cases, it is usually better that you bypass enhancement altogether and have a forensic linguist examine your recording. If parts of the recording can be improved by enhancement, he will be able to do it himself as needed.

* * * * *

Click here for real examples of forensic transcription being used in legal cases.

We often succeed where others have failed.

Better recordings result in better accuracy, quicker turnaround, and a lower-cost transcript. Click here to read about our recording tips for transcription

Return to the main transcription page.