Specifying Challenges in Transcribing Covert Recordings: Implications for Forensic Transcription

Covert audio recordings feature in the criminal justice system a variety of guises, either on their own or accompanied by video. If legally obtained, such can provide important forensic evidence. However, quality these potentially valuable evidential is often very poor and content indistinct, to extent that jury requires an accompanying transcript. At present, many international jurisdictions, transcriptions are produced investigating police officers involved case, but transcription highly complex, meticulous onerous task, untrained have vested interest influence transcript which gives rise potential inaccuracy. This paper reports design results controlled experiment eight linguistically trained professional transcribers transcripts for recording conversation between five adults busy restaurant. In context covert recordings, this shares typical features including presence multiple speakers, background noise use non-specialist equipment. We present detailed qualitative quantitative comparison transcripts, identifying areas agreement disagreement (a) speaker attribution (b) representation linguistic content. find frequent various nature; most common causes identified as (i) omission speech included other (ii) variation turns, (iii) orthographic seemingly motivated phonetic similarity, (iv) not similarity. argue variable nature “challenging” must be considered contexts make recommendations improving practice production transcriptions.