If you’ve never done anything like this before, it may be worth taking a look at the following instructions on how to transcribe a foreign-language interview for The Busking Project. It can be a long process, depending on whether it’s your first time doing it — expect about ten minutes of work for every minute of speech (perhaps longer if they’re fast talkers).

We simply can’t afford to hire 9 translators to help us make this documentary. It just won’t happen. So, we need your help, and will be VERY grateful for it. Thanks a lot for offering to get involved, we love you for it,

Nick, Belle and Chris

STEP 1: Choosing an interview

Some videos have worse audio than others. You may need to wear headphones to listen to the interviews properly. So, listen to the videos, see if you can do it, and send us an email telling us which ones you’ve chosen. You can ask us to transfer the source video to you, which will probably be much easier than editing off of YouTube. We’ll send you a small MP4 file via wetransfer.com.

Here are the languages we need translated, just click on the links to see the playlists:
Bengali (3 Videos)
Chinese (4 Videos)
French (6 Videos)
Greek (3 Videos)
Hindi? (16 Videos)
Indonesian? (6 Videos)
Japanese (5 Videos)
Korean (6 Videos)
Spanish (89 Videos)

STEP 2: Transcribing

  • Chill out. There’s no rush, it’ll take a while, and could be fiddly, depending on what software you’re using, and how familiar you are with your equipment. Finding a way of flicking quickly between a text editor (like Text Edit) and your browser can help a lot.
  • Transcribe everything that is said into the source language.
  • You don’t need to transcribe all the “ums” or supurfluous words. We just have to get the interviewee’s meaning and intentions.

To give you some example of what I mean, imagine the interviewee said this.

“You see, back when I was a fisherman in Liverpool working down at the old docks each day, I had a, well, how should I put it…a…an anger that I couldn’t lose. Then I discovered that I could play the guitar pretty well, and people liked to hear me sing, and, well, I don’t know what to tell you, but I just started busking for change, you know?”

 

You could transcribe that as:

“You see, back when I was a fisherman in Liverpool working down at the old docks each day, I had a, well, how should I put it…a...an anger that I couldn’t lose. Then I discovered that I could play the guitar pretty well, and people liked to hear me sing, and, well, I don’t know what to tell you, but [So] I just started busking for change, you know?“

 

The final sentence will look like this:

“When I was a fisherman in Liverpool working down at the old docks, I had an anger that I couldn’t lose. Then I discovered that I could play the guitar well, and people liked to hear me sing. So I just started busking for change.”

 

 STEP 3: Translate

Translate the interview into English. Be as precise as possible — we don’t want to get the wrong idea! Also, please add the interviewer’s questions, where relevant. Sometimes it will change the interviewee’s answers to know what exactly was asked.

STEP 4: Timecodes

Send us the translation. We will read it, and tell you which sentences or paragraphs are interesting to us. Your job will be to find the “in” and “out” codes for the video, to tell us exactly when the interviewee has said something. This would mean telling which second (or which frame) the sentence starts and ends, and which syllables (“the shenesayqua sound”), noises (car horn in the background, interviewer asks another question…even a pause) or gestures (hand movements) that will help us find exactly when we need to edit the video.

Example

Here I’ve got a video of Adrian, a saxophonist we recorded in Lisbon. If you check out the transcription I made of it, you can see that I’ve ignored the beginning bit when we’re rambling, and simplified some of the language. I’ve also added timecodes for the start of each paragraph, and split the paragraphs up. Here’s the video I got the transcript from: (Transcript Link)