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What Is Verbatim Transcription?

Verbatim transcription writes down speech exactly as it was said: every um and uh, repeated words, false starts, stutters and often non-verbal sounds like [laughs]. Its opposite, clean verbatim, keeps the speaker's words and meaning but removes fillers and stumbles so the text reads smoothly.

Example
Full verbatim:
I, um, I think we should — we should probably wait until, uh, March.

Clean verbatim:
I think we should probably wait until March.

When you need full verbatim

Legal records, police interviews and some research methods, such as conversation analysis, depend on hesitations and repetitions: they show uncertainty, interruptions and how people think out loud.

When clean verbatim is better

Interviews for articles, meeting notes, podcasts and subtitles. Readers want what was said, not every pause, and clean text is faster to read and quote.

Neither is a summary

Both styles keep the speaker's own words. Rewriting into shorter sentences or fixing grammar is editing, and the transcript should say if that happened.

Questions

Is verbatim transcription more accurate?

It is more complete, not more accurate. Both should get every meaningful word right.

Which style do researchers use?

It depends on the method: conversation and discourse analysis need full verbatim, thematic analysis usually works with clean verbatim.

Does verbatim cost more?

With human transcription, usually yes, because it takes longer. With AI the cost is the same; the extra work is in proofreading.

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Related terms

  • Speaker diarization

    Speaker diarization is the step in speech recognition that works out who spoke when. It splits a recording into segments by voice and labels them Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on, so an interview or meeting transcript shows each person's turns instead of one block of text.

  • Timecode

    Timecode is a label for every frame of video, written as hours:minutes:seconds:frames — 01:02:03:12 is frame 12 of the third second. Editors use it to find the same moment in every copy of a project. Subtitle files usually count time in milliseconds instead, which is where mix-ups start.

  • SRT file

    An SRT file (SubRip Subtitle, .srt) is a plain-text subtitle file. Each subtitle is a numbered cue with a start and end time and one or two lines of text. Players and platforms show the text over the video at those times, and viewers can switch it on or off.

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