A few months ago, one of my friends forwarded an advertisement to me, that a company, then unknown to me, is looking for Norwegian speakers to transcribe texts. After maybe a day or two, another friend sent me the same thing. I thought, if this was connected to me twice, I must take a closer look at it. A tiny spoiler – in addition to speaking Norwegian, I am also a language nerd. This is how I ended up transcribing Norwegian for Feelingstream.
Sweet anticipation
When the day of training came, I was quite anxious and had my pen and notebook ready. Even though all of the materials of the training were available online, I prefer to write things down as well. This is another of my geek sides – real pen-to-paper writing. It acts like fixing information in my brain, like burning stuff on CD’s in the “old days”. Even though the notebook became quite full of notes (that have been very helpful ever since), I must admit that my mind was already wondering around – how will the actual work be, can’t we already start, I want to start with the texts already, etc. And when it was time for the first try, I started to smile to myself – I had found a way to put my language nerd side into profitable practice and not only in a financial meaning. In a sense, this work also acts like therapy to me – every time I do it, I get this cool fuzzy feeling inside.
What about Svorsk?
When I had my first independent try with transcribing, I got a hundred additional questions in my head. One of them was: “What shall we do with the texts that are in Svorsk?”, Svorsk being a blend of Norwegian and Swedish. There are so many words that are so alike, in both writing and pronouncing, that is quite difficult to spot the difference at all. And my main concern with this was that what if this will be taking too much time for everyone to try to spot the difference? But through cooperation between the tech support and the rest of the transcribers, we of course found a solution to this. Luckily Danish sounds quite a bit different, but then the written language is again like Norwegian. Think about it – you have 3 languages, out of which 2 sound alike and 2 are written alike. Feeling it yet? And if you then add the Norwegian dialects to the equation, your brain can crash at some point.
Quality specialist of Norwegian language
After I had been transcribing for a while, I asked about the quality check of the texts, when will they be checked. I was excited to get honest feedback. Well, long story short – this resulted with that it was me who started as the quality specialist of Norwegian language for Feelingstream. It was a cool step forward! It required to start to think more on how to give feedback, how to encourage but at the same time still point out the places that needed more attention in the transcription work. Now, this is what most of my time goes to, but at the same time – this makes the transcribing part even sweeter.
Transcribing is fit for an entrepreneur like me
Another just as important side to this work, that makes it so suitable for me is that since I am an entrepreneur and have clients from different sectors:
1. My daily plans can change in a blink of an eye;
2. The main nature of my work is communication but at the same time, I love to be by myself, without anyone or any verbal conversation around me.
Therefore, this work feels like it is meant for me – I can do it in silence in my home office, at a time chosen by me. I sometimes even spare this part of work to end my day, to end it with this chill feeling.
Written by Mari Kullerkup
