Transcribing bloopers

My first job as an American English trainer in a medical transcription startup was quite a revelation but interesting. It was an American company which expected Indian trainees to transcribe medical reports accurately — and fast! During the fledging days, trainees took keen interest to master complex medical terminology, American grammar and syntax and the basics of word processing and typing 75 wpm. But as in any job, they were learning the ropes on the go, mastering the art of deciphering accents and perfecting themselves by learning from the previous day’s errors.

The silver lining in this gruelling dark cloud of training was the fun and light-hearted banter that pervaded during it. Trainees were advised not to take themselves too seriously and instead laugh heartily at inadvertent harmless mistakes. As trainees became students all over again, they espoused much enthusiasm and gusto to hone listening skills by transcribing “dummy” or “done files” with the aim of making their future reports 100% accurate or perfect.

It is understandable that the uninitiated and untrained ears did result in a string of inadvertent bloopers. Although ‘to err is human and to forgive is divine’, the US management felt that some of the initial bloopers were so bizarre that they could just not be forgiven!

For example, one trainee transcribed ‘Normocephalic and atraumatic’ as ‘Normocephalic and automatic’. A computer geek from NIIT, fully entrenched in computer and internet jargon, transcribed ‘The patient is a 27-year-old female’ as ‘The patient is a 27-year-old e-mail’. The blooper of all bloopers, however, was when one trainee, obviously struck by an onslaught of malapropism, transcribed, ‘The patient is trying hard to concentrate’ as ‘The patient is trying hard to constipate’.

After I finished training and stepped into the official shoes of a trainer, I tried to instill fun ways of learning arduous concepts in American English. I taught them synonyms, antonyms, and homophones.

Much teaching and endless worksheets later, I finally managed to make the trainees discern the difference between words like ‘a mourning person’ and ‘a morning person’, ‘a principal’ and ‘a principle’, and ‘diploid’ and ‘deployed’.

I taught the trainees to hone their listening skills and common sense to see that all the words they transcribed fit into the context of medical reports. For example, a patient going through a cancer recovery and, additionally had a divorce proceeding to attend to could not possibly be ‘cheery’ — in most probability common sense would allude that the patient is ‘teary’.

However, to add to the banter, words were sometimes transcribed as abbreviations, quite ignorantly. For example, ‘weepy’ would be typed as ‘VP’, obesity as ‘OBCT’ but the joke of all jokes is when ‘analgesics’ was typed as ‘NLG6’!