I was volunteering for the day in a women’s refuge in January 2008 when I heard on the radio that the stock market had crashed, and I just knew that this was going to be very bad news for the economy, and for digital transcription services globally.

My surprise was our transcription service didn’t take a hit until November of that year, but once the recession started to bite we really felt it.  June 2009 was our worst month since our records began back in September 1993.

The fact that during this challenging time we never lost one single member of our transcribing team (except for Eve who gave birth to beautiful baby Freddie)  just shows me how amazing each and every one of our transcribers are, and how dedicated they are to McGowan Transcriptions.  Most of us saw our incomes halved, and many of our partners lost their jobs, and we often wondered if we were going to hang on in there, but we did and we are now stronger than ever.

February 2011 was the first month since January 2008 when we have actually beat our figures for the amount of focus group discussions and depth interview transcriptions since our records began!

We have been steadily recovering for five months now and the team have gone from twiddling their fingers (or excessively cleaning!) to audio typing sometimes 12 hours a day but the swings and roundabouts seem to be evening out now and we are back in a position of strength and are able to concentrate on what we do best; digital transcription.

We do not sub-contract out any audio transcription services and the way the team has pulled together over the last few years has really made me thankful that we’ve kept to this ethos for 18 years, as we are a strong team and as Zac would say “we’re all in this together”!

So in answer to my own question ‘is the recession finally coming to an end’…the answer for McGowan Transcriptions has to be yes…but my fingers are crossed firmly behind my back!

Follow this link to meet our fantastic team of professional transcribers.

As a British expat living in Brittany, France, one of the first questions you’ll be asked by another expat within the first five minutes of meeting them is, what do you do for a living?  That’s because here the expats are split into the two categories; you have the retired baby boomers who have had nice lives in the UK, sold their British house for a nice tasty profit, bought a des res here in France and have a regular healthy income from UK state and private pensions and who are intrigued by those who actually work in France, then there are the rest of us.  Most of us who work here are like me, young families trying to learn a new language and integrate into a different culture.  Most of the Brits working here in France seem to be in the building trade, they’ve made a reasonable living over the last 10 years or so working for other Brits while the British economy was booming and the pound was strong against the Euro.  However, things have changed over the last few years the strength of the pound has dropped, so all those Brits who have an income in sterling have found that their money doesn’t go as far as it once did.  People can’t afford to renovate properties any more and building work is drying up.  So when an expat asks you what you do for a living these days, they’re either hoping that you’ve got enough of an income where maybe you can give them some work, or that you’re onto something that they can get into and earn some money that way.

When I tell them I work for a transcription company in the UK, generally the first thing they will say, “oh translation so your French must be really good then”.  I then go on to say, “no not translation, TRANSCRIPTION”.  Always without a doubt you get a blank look come over their faces, “transcription, what’s that then?” So you explain, about two minutes into the explanation, you can see you’ve lost them, they don’t know what you’re talking about, so in the end I say, “well basically I’m a secretary” that they understand.

When a French person asks me what I do it’s a different kettle of fish, it’s harder to explain in French.  They understand transcription, it’s the same word just said with a French accent (try it), but then I have to explain I download work from the computer.  Until two years ago, my French wasn’t good enough to do this, that was until I got a job teaching English to French students for 20 hours a week in a local comprehensive school.  They taught me the French word for downloading when they were explaining which websites I could go to, to download any pirate music or films that I wanted.  The girls then went on to teach me how to ask for hair straighteners in the local supermarket when I had an  emergency and went to work looking like a poodle because my GHD’s had broken and I need to replace them pronto, how to ask the hairdresser to put layers into my hair (four years of looking like Nana Mouskouri until I learned that one) and most importantly the words to tell the difference between a Brazilian and a Hollywood when asking for a bikini wax at the local beauticians.  They also taught me how to swear in French with a perfect Breton accent.  Hopefully they learned a bit from me, they definitely learned how to swear, probably managed to cover the basics of that on day one, they learned of my love for George Clooney and that I think The Killers are the bees knees, and I know for sure that there are a whole bunch of 11 – 20 year olds who are wandering round a small part of Brittany saying, “Now then, are you all reet” in a North Eastern accent.  However, the one verb they didn’t teach me was the verb “to type”, five years on and I still don’t know the verb to type.  So I start off my conversation about work by saying I download my work, so far so good, and then I go on to say I type it, but I can’t say type, so I mime bashing a keyboard.  They think I’m a pianist, no not a musician, then I say which when translated into English is “I hit the keyboard of my computer”, I’ve managed to get round that little problem, but would probably be easier if I learned how to say to type in French.  Next though I try to describe it’s market research, I don’t know the word for market research, I’ve never bothered to learn it, every time I have the conversation about my job I make a mental note to learn it but then I forget, and all the time I’m trying to search in my head for the right words to say in French they’re stood in front of me with this patient expectant look on their faces, so as a last resort I say, “I’m a secretary”.  “Oh oui”, they say.

Blog written by Nicky Whenman

It was when I first became a transcriber for McGowan Transcriptions in August 2010 that I truly understood the importance of my Infinity foot pedal!

I had just started getting a few audio files through and working from my garden office and had not yet ordered my pedal, and had to type without one which meant I had to manually stop and start and couldn’t rewind anything. I was transcribing till almost 10 or 11pm at night on some particularly tricky audio files and going through endless amounts of black coffee!

I finally got my foot pedal about 1 week into transcribing and have never looked back.

When I get a tricky word or the sound is a bit distorted I simply rewind and re-listen and do it again and again until I get the right word, something almost impossible without the transcription pedal.

As it’s a USB pedal it’s also portable so I can take it with me anywhere and transcribe; I’ll be looking forward to moving to the deck in the summer and getting some sun while transcribing group discussions and depth interviews!

Thank you inventor of Infinity foot pedals for making my life as an audio transcriber possible!

Blog by Nikki Mulcahey