I just printed out the CastingWords giude.

pwt · Feb 13, 2013

I don't think it's fair to just dismiss that time either, though. Fair or unfair, if you worked for two hours and made $5, that tells the story. CW may not pay you to find HITs, only to do them, but finding them is still part of the job. *shrug*

ewd76 · May 28, 2013

pwt said: ↑

Not nuts about it so far.

* The additional rules for speaker labeling should apply to editors, not transcribers. That's not our job. We transcribe the audio, the editor makes the transcript more useful for the customer. If CW wants us to do both jobs, they should pay us for both jobs. Let's be realistic, for the horrible pay we're getting, CW has no right to demand something like that.

* Most of those rules are nonsensical on top of that. There should be one way to label an audience speaker and one way only. Exceptions slow everything down and add confusion.

* Bullet points with no vertical spacing is an eyesore.

* No table of contents.

* Most or all instances of "Do this" should be replaced by a correct example and an incorrect example of what was just explained, so that there's context.

* Still has important information located in other documents. Rare situations and the sample transcript should be integrated into the style guide. An ideal style guide should actually make the sample transcript redundant.

* The sample transcript is useless. It's missing 90% of the rules from the guideline because it's so short. It's also not representative of the audio we normally see. It should have things like inaudible words, pauses, odd sounds that need to be transcribed (sounds we should transcribe and sound we shouldn't), and the audio it came from should accompany it.

* Still missing information, such as guidance on handling quotations.

* Still wrongly dictates the use double dashes and ellipsis. See http://en.****pedia.org/****/Em_dash#Em_dash. If the guide is telling us to do something that is wrong after lecturing transcribers about using good grammar and punctuation, that's a huge problem.

* There are many unnecessarily confusing sections like the very first one. First it says "No special instructions can ever counteract certain CW requirements", which is followed by "Aside from the exceptions above, when your special instructions contradict the style here, follow the special instructions."

That is an impossible contradiction. It should have said something along the lines of:

"Special instructions on a CastingWords transcription HIT may override any rule in this document, except for the following: ..."

* The first five bullet points after that are aimless. They should exist within other sections.

* The last bullet point of the five is invalid. It says to use word wrap, which is a display function whose behavior will vary from program to program. It is not a formatting function. If you turn word wrap off in UltraEdit for example, it'll create a scroll bar in your document and keep everything you type on a single line until you hit the enter key. If you activate word wrap, it will get rid of the scroll bar and visually break long strings of text across multiple lines on its own. But the text itself remains the same in both modes. Copying a long paragraph to the clipboard in either mode will result in identical text: one long string.

Shouldn't talk about program functions, should say "Keep each paragraph on its own line; don't spread it across multiple lines by hitting the enter key."

* Repeats the invalid directive later on: "Word wrap must be turned on" and "Do not use software that does not have word wrap". Not only is this wrong, it's also redundant.

* Makes no more clear the right way to handle paragraph length. Still sticks with the simplistic "no more than 400 characters". For many months I was punished for keeping paragraphs under 400 characters, but also keeping them nearly 400 characters, because the guide didn't say anything more specific than the maximum character count. Not one editor, grader, or CW employee told me what I was doing was wrong, but once I figured it out for myself, my grades began to improve.

Should say "No more than two or three sentences, and certainly no more than 400 characters, whichever is shorter."

And ideally, it should be brutally honest and say: "Visual pleasure should trump the transcript making sense", because that's what CW really wants.

I could go on like this for quite a while. This new guide is a step up from the last one, but it still needs a lot of work. It's going to slow me down significantly for a while and for no good reason. It'll take me as long to memorize the new pointless speaker labeling requirements as it will to read, re-read, and read again all the confusing passages so that I get the rule while ignoring all the contradictions and poor structure.

Hate to be cold about it, but this new guide hurts as much as it helps.

On another note: I'm so sick and tired of this forum not working. One of the reasons I'll pop up for a day or two and then vanish for months at a time is because I'm sick to death of having to clear my cookies before a login will take, only to try to post something and see this: http://i.imgbox.com/adbyx2aJ.png

No other vbulletin site online does this to me. Just this one. And it drives me away.
Click to expand...

The best use I could find for it was as scrap paper. I want money for just having to read that thing. That's a full time job in itself.

I just printed out the CastingWords giude.

pwt User

ewd76 User

Share This Page