|
Hey guys! I captioned telephone calls about 5 years ago for about a year at the tail end of college. I really liked the work (cause I'm a nosey creep who likes listening to other people talk) but the pay wasn't great and I moved out of the area so had to quit. Now my husband and I are expecting our first baby and the more I think about handing my little 8 week old to strangers I barely know so I can go to an office everyday, the more determined I am to find something I can do from home. In order to quit my current job after baby is born/maternity leave is up, I would need to be making $750 a week pre-tax by mid-January. Is that a reasonable amount to expect to make transcribing full-time or am I over-shooting?
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 00:02
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 14:15 |
|
|
SquirrelFace posted:Hey guys! I captioned telephone calls about 5 years ago for about a year at the tail end of college. I really liked the work (cause I'm a nosey creep who likes listening to other people talk) but the pay wasn't great and I moved out of the area so had to quit. It's not impossible, but it'd be one hell of a stretch. It took me way longer than six months to get enough reliable, high paying clients to replace a full-time salary. Most of the places that pay a decent rate for non-garbage work only want experienced media transcriptionists; once you get to the point where you're on the roster of two or three of them, $750 is definitely doable. The problem is, you're going have to spend a lot of time churning DT-level work to get the experience you need to get hired on, and most of them want more than six months (more like two years). Also, this is the kind of work you really want to be careful with when you've got a family to support. The workload ebbs and flows, transcription houses fold up shop or lose clients. Until you get a really diverse (read: not reality TV production) body of clients, you can expect to take a 10-25% pay hit any month with a holiday in (because work spins down, and that means no tapes are being shot, which means you've got to wait for the pipeline to fill up again to make money), and December-January can be a nightmare depending on who you're working for. This is why I've got one client that does captioning, one that does pre-production reality, and one that does mainly news. (Oh my God I love news work I would literally kiss Trump on the mouth for all the money he's earned me from news gigs, although I'd probably go for a rabies shot right afterward. The next three weeks for me are going to be basically like that bit in "Four Rooms" where Tim Roth runs for the door and Tarantino just yells "MONEY!" at him.)
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 01:44
|
|
|
Is DT still more or less the best place to get started with transcription work?
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 01:51
|
|
|
kazmeyer posted:Smart things Good to know. I'll probably still start doing it part-time cause I like the work and I like money. Even if I can't make full time money that quick, hopefully I can save up enough that I can take the full 12 weeks off without feeling guilty. My husband and I both make enough to independently support us (on a VERY tight budget) if one of us were to lose our job so some ebbing of workload wouldn't be too bad in the long run.
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 03:33
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:Is DT still more or less the best place to get started with transcription work? Best place, although hilariously mismanaged they'll give you work and usually pay on time. SquirrelFace, you'd need to be able to do about 880 minutes of footage for DT per week to make $750 or 126 minutes per day with no day off, which is a high enough number of footage minutes that I considered killing myself and I'm not even the one who would be doing them. Mind you that doesn't account for the taxable part of the pay.
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 14:48
|
|
|
Pikestaff posted:I see Appen/Leapforce/Lionbridge thrown around a lot. I don't have personal experience with them, and I don't even know what they're really about because they're under NDA, but someone else who deals with them might be able to jump in with some details. There is also UHRS for busywork, which I am in via Clickworker (I signed up for Clickworker and then signed up for UHRS from there.) Leapforce probably isn't a great idea for someone in the states just looking for 1-2 hours week as they have a productivity quota you're meant to be meeting. It isn't huge but does require some input- maybe it's easier for American agents to bang out with their higher task volume.
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 16:46
|
|
|
Shima Honnou posted:Best place, although hilariously mismanaged they'll give you work and usually pay on time. What you're going to get from DT that's most valuable is experience in media transcription. They do pretty much everything the high-end places do, so pay attention. Learning new formats is always a good thing and will open doors. Speaking of other houses though, I pinged Craigslist last night and saw a bunch of ads in LA, including DT looking for combined continuity transcribers (offering like $100+ for 30 mins), Verbal Ink (have heard good things, but never worked for them) and a few others (Allegis, I seem to remember there was something dodgy about them, though.) Might be a good chance for some of you to pick up new clients.
|
|
#
?
Jul 16, 2016 19:37
|
|
|
kazmeyer posted:including DT looking for combined continuity transcribers (offering like $100+ for 30 mins) DT is getting back into that? Interesting. Last time my company ordered a CCSL from them (before I was around) they were apparently garbage. At $3.33 to the contractor (give or take) they'll probably charge $10-15/minute to their clients which is very cheap, since most other established places charge $20+/minute. Turnarounds being what they are, though, I'd rather go with the place that I won't have to spot-check after receiving the completed script. My boss may disagree 
|
|
#
?
Jul 17, 2016 00:43
|
|
|
So I submitted my test to DT Saturday night, got a confirmation email saying they received it last night and then got a "congrats, you passed" just a few minutes ago. ....So I guess they have a lot of work available?
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2016 22:04
|
|
|
SquirrelFace posted:So I submitted my test to DT Saturday night, got a confirmation email saying they received it last night and then got a "congrats, you passed" just a few minutes ago. My friend, you have such sights to be shown...
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2016 03:20
|
|
|
Shima Honnou posted:My friend, you have such sights to be shown... So what I'm hearing is I should skip Leapforce and go straight to DT?
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2016 03:28
|
|
|
MockingQuantum posted:So what I'm hearing is I should skip Leapforce and go straight to DT? Yes. If they're approving someone without it taking weeks then they've got a shitload of work or they've lost a shitload of transcribers.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2016 04:10
|
|
|
In the past, the number of people signed up on their sign up thing for work was usually 40ish the day before, but lately it's been 50ish.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2016 06:08
|
|
|
My primary source of income, UHRS, has reached its summer slowdown, so now I'm off to try my hand at Amazon MTurk. I am armed with the finest Greasemonky scripts and the willingness to work for $5 an hour. Wish me luck!
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2016 07:30
|
|
|
counterfeitsaint posted:In the past, the number of people signed up on their sign up thing for work was usually 40ish the day before, but lately it's been 50ish. I've been reluctantly signing up the night before and have been getting normal work, but then again they haven't been begging for work. I don't know if I get moved up in the queue for being there for like 1.5 years or not though. Good luck new DT, feel free to ask questions of us.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2016 12:58
|
|
|
Curvature of Earth posted:My primary source of income, UHRS, has reached its summer slowdown, so now I'm off to try my hand at Amazon MTurk. I am armed with the finest Greasemonky scripts and the willingness to work for $5 an hour. Wish me luck! Unveil your secrets. I've tried MTurk before but most of the work required 1000+ completed assignments and the stuff that didn't seemed worse than the bottom-barrel that DT's ever given me.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2016 18:39
|
|
|
Shima Honnou posted:Unveil your secrets. I've tried MTurk before but most of the work required 1000+ completed assignments and the stuff that didn't seemed worse than the bottom-barrel that DT's ever given me. I did some transcription on MTURK before I knew better and they give you like 30 seconds at a time of crappy local government meetings for .08-.11..... Everything else worked out to even lower pay per hour. I even saw one where the person wanted people to research law firms contact info and he would pay only the people who found the most. Everyone else would be paid in "experience"  Needless to say, I stopped doing anything on that site real quick....
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2016 21:39
|
|
|
Whenever I use MTurk, I sort by payout and do the psych studies because I can't transcribe. It's occasionally interesting.
|
|
#
?
Jul 21, 2016 01:08
|
|
|
Is there a particular way to decline work from DT without pissing someone off too much? Just send a decline email to submissions and the assigner? Anything special?
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 01:18
|
|
|
Nope, that's it's. You don't work for them so you don't owe anything more than a yes or no for an assignment.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 01:37
|
|
|
That doesn't stop them from getting pissy and spitefully refusing to book you for a week though. Sometimes you just gotta pick between a bad assignment or eat their lovely look for a few days.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 20:53
|
|
|
Shima Honnou posted:That doesn't stop them from getting pissy and spitefully refusing to book you for a week though. Sometimes you just gotta pick between a bad assignment or eat their lovely look for a few days. I am a bitch and have still never rejected a thing. I'm ready for it though, the next time they try to give me dialogue that isn't 80 minutes that only resulted in 10 pages of a well mic'd guy just saying stuff once in a while for 75 cents they're gonna get it!
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2016 22:38
|
|
|
Curvature of Earth posted:My primary source of income, UHRS, has reached its summer slowdown, so now I'm off to try my hand at Amazon MTurk. I am armed with the finest Greasemonky scripts and the willingness to work for $5 an hour. Wish me luck! If you know what you're doing it's possible to make what I'd call "beer money" off the site; a hundred or two hundred a month maybe. I use it to do surveys while watching let's plays and it's not too bad. On the hand If you were serious about working full time and making US minimum wage off the site I don't think that's possible unless you're some kind of programming/scripting expert and have some angle figured out.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 07:04
|
|
|
Got my first assignment with DT and its.....a seven minute phone call with an insurance company..... At least it's clear and no time codes, but I put 45 minutes available Friday through Monday and this is it so far...
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 18:16
|
|
|
Monday's are kinda dead usually, unless it's busy time... And they might send you some more later in the day.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 18:43
|
|
|
SquirrelFace posted:Got my first assignment with DT and its.....a seven minute phone call with an insurance company..... Just be happy you got an assignment on the same day you were available.
|
|
#
?
Jul 25, 2016 23:48
|
|
|
I don't know why, but it seems like recently DT has been real weird about how they are assigning work and managing the schedule. Like now they're rolling over minutes if they don't max out what I requested on the schedule and just sending work at the weirdest times. For example I'll get 90 minutes Tuesday morning that are due Thursday morning and then Wednesday evening they'll send me 220 minutes due first thing Friday morning. Had to reject it because I'm not working all night long just 'cause they decided to roll over extra minutes from Tuesday/Wednesday and then bundle them with Thursday. Had a similar situation happen last week where they tried to tack on an extra 100 minutes or something for Saturday even though I wasn't on the schedule which also ended up in a rejection. I don't know what's going on, but for months I was getting my requested minutes the night before and I would have a full days worth of time to do the work.Pete Zah posted:Is there a particular way to decline work from DT without pissing someone off too much? Just send a decline email to submissions and the assigner? Anything special? I always reply to submissions with a simple email that looks like this. I reject FILE #: FILE ONE FILE TWO Then they should confirm your rejection with a REASSIGNED email. I've rejected maybe seven or eight files in the past 8 months I've been with them, three of those rejections being in the last two weeks and I haven't gotten any guff from them or been put on a "poo poo list" or whatever. I've rejected work one day and then the next day I'll still get an assignment. Though I always reject within an hour of the assignment email. I imagine they might get pissed if you reject a ton of work during a busy week, but right now it seems pretty slow and you should be fine.
|
|
#
?
Jul 27, 2016 23:38
|
|
|
Is this a certain project with industry interviews? Those are super easy and I usually take them. DT usually doesn't care if you have to reject an assignment because you've been assigned too much. Just ask them to reassign ASAP, or ask if you can just work on an hour of it, etc. Sometimes they'll get pissy if everyone's rejecting a crappy client.
|
|
#
?
Jul 28, 2016 01:45
|
|
|
Scripted rejected me  I like to think I'm a fairly good writer and thought I aced their writing prompts, but I guess not. My prompt was to write a short blog post about 3 destinations to see in [city you're familiar with] for young families while providing at least two references to a travel guide attached to the prompt, followed by a short description of an article of clothing that combined advertising and SEO marketing. As feedback, I got "Our editorial team has found that there were several grammar errors and awkward phrases throughout your application." and "Guideline adherence: Our editorial team has found that your application did not adhere to all required guidelines". For anyone that's successfully gotten through the application process, can you offer any tips? I'm confident that I adhered to all of the required guidelines and didn't make that many grammatical mistakes. I'm considering just creating a new email and trying again, but would also like to know if anyone's found it to be worthwhile over time. I also applied to WriterAccess, but still waiting on their editorial review process to complete.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 16:24
|
|
|
a shameful boehner posted:Scripted rejected me Until they moved over to their new stupid payment system that only works in the US and like, ten other countries, Scripted was my highest paying writing gig. It's definitely worth it, especially (like all the others) you get a few clients that really like what you write. Their standards are incredibly high though, and I think I got rejected for a number of specialist categories because I wasn't specialized enough. I heartily recommend something like Grammarly to make sure that your grammar and spelling are 100% correct.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 19:00
|
|
|
Thanks! I'll give it another try with a different email address. e: Got accepted to WA with a 4/6 rating today, so I'll see how I do on that platform then re-evaluate applying to Scripted again. ex post facho fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Aug 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2016 19:07
|
|
|
I tried the DT qualification test and I was able to do the transcription ok. I did all it of it was a bit of work for 6:30 but doable and not a problem I don't mind just transcription. What made me just give up is the need for the time stamps every 30 seconds based on the video.It was just too much work on top of the headers and then wanting perfect formating. What does DT pay per minute? For that level of difficult level of work I'd want $25 that's how tough it was for me and the qualifying test doesn't even pay obviously. I guess I"m not the right type of personality for transcription. Would I do much better a with pedal and a time keeping program I saw mentioned? I don't mind just doing the transcription but stuff like syncing up time is asking too much unless they are paying a really great wage.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2016 06:35
|
|
|
DropsySufferer posted:time stamps every 30 seconds  You're using Express Scribe or Inqscribe right? Either of those in conjunction with a pedal and you should be banging out a 22-minute show in 2 hours or less once you find your groove. I found my own groove after about 3 months when I first started captioning/transcribing.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2016 06:55
|
|
|
Jedi Knight Luigi posted:
This. I just started working with DT about 2 weeks ago and I'm already getting faster. That test took about 3.5 hours for me to get all the formatting and time codes because I didn't have a pedal or really know how to use the software so I was typing everything manually and looking up things in the style guide constantly. It's super simple to set macros in inqscribe to add the time code (or speaker name, etc) and just doing that saves a ton of time. Plus, as you learn the formatting you just do it automatically and that will save proofreading time. Also, I've done 6 six assignments for them so far and nothing has been nearly as bad as Alton Brown in a noisy kitchen. That being said, the work can be tedious and you have to be a bit of a perfectionist to catch all the dumb sounds people make and dumb mistakes you'll make typing so if that drives you crazy, this might not be your thing.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2016 13:11
|
|
|
DropsySufferer posted:I tried the DT qualification test and I was able to do the transcription ok. I did all it of it was a bit of work for 6:30 but doable and not a problem I don't mind just transcription. What made me just give up is the need for the time stamps every 30 seconds based on the video.It was just too much work on top of the headers and then wanting perfect formating. I wouldn't bother transcribing without either Inqscribe or Express Scribe and a foot pedal. Sometimes the client will want time code on every answer/question so if you're hitting more than 2 keys to paste timecode then you're doing it wrong. Pay is usually .75-.80 cents per minute for non-rush stuff. You can get a free 14 day trial on Inqscribe to try it out.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2016 19:28
|
|
|
Pisco crazy!
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2016 20:30
|
|
|
Not quite because doing it that way was making me feel crazy and I decided to quit! Yeah though I felt like doing it that way! In my defence I did decide there was no way in hell I was manually going to keep up with the timestamps on the video. I will take a break from attempting this again but next shot I'll use Express Scribe or Inqscribe. I wonder if DT has time limit to it's qualification task? What I'll probably do is rest a bit get these bad thoughts of doing work the wrong way of my system and try again in a few weeks or month with another email or something. Thanks for letting me know the about software I should have used!
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2016 20:49
|
|
|
DropsySufferer posted:Not quite because doing it that way was making me feel crazy and I decided to quit! Yeah though I felt like I remember there being a 24 hour turnaround for the qualification assignment, but maybe that's changed in the past 9 months. Seriously though try that Inqscribe trial, it pretty much blows Express Scribe out of the water in every respect. I think someone in this very thread turned me onto it and I never looked back at Express Scribe. Remember this qualification is to weed out people that won't make the cut. I've only had a handful of files as difficult as that iron chef test, but they're few and far between. Most of the assignments I get from DT are 2 person interviews that are a walk in the park.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2016 21:45
|
|
|
DropsySufferer posted:Not quite because doing it that way was making me feel crazy and I decided to quit! Yeah though I felt like It's okay if you just don't want to transcribe too, though tests like these are meant to be as difficult and infuriating as possible, and I definitely felt some of what you're feeling when I tested. I haven't taken the new test, but before transcribing I never noticed Alton Brown was such a stutterer. You can test again later with DT, thought it would probably be better to wait a little while.
|
|
#
?
Aug 3, 2016 23:39
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 14:15 |
|
|
AuntBuck posted:I haven't taken the new test, but before transcribing I never noticed Alton Brown was such a stutterer. You can test again later with DT, thought it would probably be better to wait a little while. That's the magic of editing! My husband is watching Cutthroat Kitchen right now and there are no stutters or false starts to be found.
|
|
#
?
Aug 4, 2016 02:35
|
|