I have no idea if the following story is funny only to fellow transcribers or in general, but I'm going to share, anyway.
Y'all know I'm training Katie as a transcriber. It's not as easy as those who haven't done it might think. When transcribing for the legal system, each transcript must be perfect not only as in no typos, which in this day and age of computers is not much of an issue, but no spelling errors, and pretty much grammatically and punctuatically perfect. (Obviously, therefore, a great job for Grammar Moses.) You have to have at least some sort of a brain to be able to produce acceptable court transcripts. And of course there are the many, many rules for how the transcripts are set up, and legal terminology to learn and so on.
Katie is doing very well. However, the other day she ran across a line in a hearing which quite bewildered her. She puzzled and puzzled over it, listening to it over and over, and this is what she finally came up with:
I will be presenting Mr. Prentice, Periculam Weetie.
The only sense she could make of it was that Mr. Prentice must belong to the improbably-named law firm Periculam Weetie.
Well, not so much. You see, although Katie has a university degree, she somehow had never run across a certain very important term for a person's credentials. The sentence, of course, was:
I will be presenting Mr. Prentice's curriculum vitae.
In the same hearing, there was a potential witness mentioned by the name of Mr. Beverage. In correcting this transcript, I suggested to Katie that the person's name might be more likely spelled Beveridge. She was most disappointed. She had this image of jolly Mr. Beverage enlivening the proceedings.
So now I can't get out of my head the image of the law firm of Periculam Weetie and Jolly Mr. Beverage, its coffee cart man.
Y'all know I'm training Katie as a transcriber. It's not as easy as those who haven't done it might think. When transcribing for the legal system, each transcript must be perfect not only as in no typos, which in this day and age of computers is not much of an issue, but no spelling errors, and pretty much grammatically and punctuatically perfect. (Obviously, therefore, a great job for Grammar Moses.) You have to have at least some sort of a brain to be able to produce acceptable court transcripts. And of course there are the many, many rules for how the transcripts are set up, and legal terminology to learn and so on.
Katie is doing very well. However, the other day she ran across a line in a hearing which quite bewildered her. She puzzled and puzzled over it, listening to it over and over, and this is what she finally came up with:
I will be presenting Mr. Prentice, Periculam Weetie.
The only sense she could make of it was that Mr. Prentice must belong to the improbably-named law firm Periculam Weetie.
Well, not so much. You see, although Katie has a university degree, she somehow had never run across a certain very important term for a person's credentials. The sentence, of course, was:
I will be presenting Mr. Prentice's curriculum vitae.
In the same hearing, there was a potential witness mentioned by the name of Mr. Beverage. In correcting this transcript, I suggested to Katie that the person's name might be more likely spelled Beveridge. She was most disappointed. She had this image of jolly Mr. Beverage enlivening the proceedings.
So now I can't get out of my head the image of the law firm of Periculam Weetie and Jolly Mr. Beverage, its coffee cart man.
2 comments:
OMG!
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