Edit Grading Guidelines
Updated 08/11/10
About CastingWords' grades
CastingWords uses Mechanical Turk to grade transcriptions and this is the biggest factor in determining your score. We also factor in information about your past work quality and your Transcriber or Editor qualification score.
We are looking for scores of 8 (B) and 9 (C) from experienced editors. Newbies might submit some 6s and 7s (C's or D's) to start because they haven't read the style guide yet and are still getting the hang of things. People who consistently score 7 (C) and lower are not going to rise up in the ranks. Lower scores will result in your qualification being lowered below what it takes to edit
General guidelines
Major Edit issues
If we were to deliver the edited transcript to the customer as is they would be disappointed in the quality of the transcription.
- Splices (----SPLICE----) left in, or removed without fixing the names on either side (i.e., the speaker labeled 'Man 1' becomes 'Man 4' after a splice marker). This is a automatic rejection, excepting occasions when the transcript in the splice is completly wrong and must be redone.
- [xx]s in the transcript. These must be fixed or if you can't figure them out, changed to [inaudible] or [indecipherable]
- Bad names. 'Nate' and 'Nathan' used for the same speaker, 'Man1' used instead of 'Man 1'. Or worse 'Nate' being used for 2 different speakers - in that case the use of last names is allowed. (Minor: 'Man 1' used when there is only one unidentified speaker, should be 'Man').
- Inaccurate transcription or paraphrasing (The words are wrong or missing - this doesn't include filler words or false starts). Yes, this is a transcription problem, but editors are our last line of defense.
- Non-existent words (Words that bring up little to no Google results, and were not used intentionally by the speaker).
Other issues
- Spelling and other minor typos
- Long paragraphs need splitting up
- Long sentences that need splitting up
- Missing punctuation
- Does not follow the CW style guide
- Incorrect notation (e.g., '(inaudible)' instead of [inaudible])
- Excessive verbatim transcription, unless requested by customer or seems appropriate
Grades
Note: sometimes there is a missing section, and the editor might leave in the SPLICE tag AND mark it with a [missing] tag. You should not grade them down in these cases. Only if a section was missing and they did not note it at all.
"Is this an accurate, readable transcript?"- (A) An impressive edit, the editor spent some time on it and really polished it up. It is ready for delivery to the customer. Sometimes an edit might not be ready for delivery but the editor had to work their butt off because some section was missing or horribly done.
- (B) Good edit. Might have some misspelled proper names or small mistakes that can be argued about but it's well-edited overall. It will need some minor fixes before delivery that should only take a minute or two.
- (C) So-so edit that needs quite a few fixes. Someone else will need to spend some time reviewing the transcript.
- (D) Not deliverable. Numerous spelling errors, non-existent words, [xx]s, speaker label issues. Either has errors that should have been fixed or practically nothing was done. It was improved enough that we want to use it but we will probably have to get it re-edited.
- (F) Not improved at all, or made worse from editing. Or other reasons to reject an edit: transcript doesn't match audio, didn't splice together sections properly (left overlap), failed to fix glaring issues, etc.)