Bonus 78: How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts - Interview with Sarah Dopierala

All of the Lingthusiasm main episodes and bonus episodes have transcripts, which involves some interesting technical challenges, including writing words in lots of languages, choosing between writing examples in their conventional spelling versus according to their phonetic value, and translating pauses and intonation into punctuation and paragraph breaks.   

In this behind the scenes bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the linguistic process of transcribing podcast episodes with Sarah Dopierala, whose name you may recognize from the credits at the end of the show! We talk about how Sarah’s background in linguistics helps her with the technical words and phonetic transcriptions in Lingthusiasm episodes, her own research into converbs as a linguistics graduate student at Goethe University Frankfurt, and the linguistic tendencies that she’s noticed from years of transcribing Lauren and Gretchen (guess which of us uses more quotative speech!). We also talk about how Sarah has found it more fun and efficient to use less automated/AI tools in her transcribing workflow over time (hint: it’s related to “link Suzy as in”), and the process she goes through to edit the spoken version so that it reads well on the page. 

All of which to say: Sarah’s job is not going away anytime soon, and it’s thanks to your support as patrons that we can keep paying her to make these beautifully edited transcripts. As a reminder, all the main episode transcripts can be found at lingthusiasm.com/transcripts (and on each episode’s shownotes page), the bonus episode transcripts are each linked to from each bonus episode’s shownotes.

Listen to this interview with our transcriptionist Sarah Dopierala, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.