Thursday, October 7th, 2021

Does Language Impact Transcription?

Language is an amazing thing. It can communicate anything and everything, from the simplest concepts to the most complex ideas imaginable, helping people from all walks of life meet at a common understanding. But knowing the words of a language isn’t the same as truly understanding it. There are a lot of things that go 

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Thursday, October 7th, 2021

The Challenges of Transcribing Group Conversations

Have you ever tried to pick out one speaker from a group discussion? It might sound simple, but it’s trickier than you think! There can be a lot of overlapping words, different volumes of speakers, inaudible sections, background noise and rustling, all of which makes getting an accurate transcription of what’s actually being said a 

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Wednesday, July 14th, 2021

The Importance of Accuracy in Research Interview Transcription

One of the first steps in qualitative research involves transcribing qualitative data such as interviews and focus groups. Making notes is an essential part of the interview process. However, it’s still possible to miss out key information when relying on notes and memory, and that’s where interview transcription can help. Research interview transcripts are invaluable 

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Wednesday, July 14th, 2021

Everyone Loves A Bargain… But At What Cost?

In the immortal words of Oscar Wilde, ‘People know the price of everything and the value of nothing’. In this day and age, everyone loves a bargain. Whether it’s a BOGOF in Tesco or a last-minute sale item stumbled upon after hours of searching on eBay, it’s human nature to want to feel that we’re getting more than we’ve paid for. How many times, though, have we landed what we think is a fantastic deal only to find that after three washes, the cheap T-shirt falls apart, the unbranded TV breaks out of warranty, or the sale item from eBay doesn’t exactly match the description on the site? When it comes to clothing or consumer goods, such experiences leave us with little more than a sense of disappointment and chagrin at our unwise opportunistic gamble. However, translate this into the context of your business – and it becomes a little more serious.


Friday, May 7th, 2021

What a fabulous start to May for the McGowan Transcription team!

Below are Trustpilot reviews that we received within a 24 hour period earlier this week. We are so grateful for every single review we receive, so to receive this many in such a short space of time was really special.  If your current transcription company doesn’t wow you, please do get in touch so we 

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Monday, March 22nd, 2021

The Zoom Art of Herding Cats

As we adapt to lockdown, we have all needed to find new ways to work. Our continuing need to conduct focus group discussions has caused a shift to holding group interviews via Zoom, Teams, Skype, etc. This has brought new challenges to moderators, whose jobs can be tricky even with face-to-face group discussions. As a 

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Tuesday, March 9th, 2021

Illiterates: The words English speakers struggle to spell the most

“Favourite” is the most difficult word to spell across the English-speaking world, according to our research of Google’s search data.  Runners-up include “definitely” and “diarrhoea” (which is spelled ‘diarrhea’ in the United States).  These results take into account common search trends across countries that speak English as a first-language. Including the United Kingdom, United States, 

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Monday, May 18th, 2020

Recording In The Cloud

Don’t forget to ask permission to record! Consider your device: It is best to conduct cloud calls on a laptop, desktop or tablet device rather than a smartphone. Sound quality will be better and access to advanced features of the cloud-based platform will be more readily available and easier to use via a larger screen/device. 

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Thursday, May 7th, 2020

Zen Master Interview Skills

As transcribers we listen to literally thousands of interviews over the course of our careers. We have the privilege of hearing respondents’ views on a vast array of subjects, and of learning about things we had never heard of before. Part of the enjoyment of the job for us is the variety of material that 

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Tuesday, August 27th, 2019

Transcriptionist’s Tips: Top Tips for Recording Better Audio Files

We’ve received our fair share of poor quality audio files over the years, and although we always do our best to ensure our work is completed to the highest standard, poor audio is a huge barrier to creating the superior quality audio transcriptions we produce here at McGowan Transcriptions. 

A good quality audio file should be clear, with limited background noise and consistent volume throughout. To help you, (and us!), we’ve put together a list of our 5 top tips for recording better audio files.