It seems it must be an extremely hard work, accurate transcription of speech. For example, I always had a profound interest in the actual lyrics on the records by the Doors, say the classic studio albums with Jim Morrison. I have bought fan-published books with transcriptions which give more than the officially-sanctioned sources, likewise found the Web sites where certain huge fans of the band provide theirs. But still I can't point to a single source which has it, say, 99% right. In the end, I had to transcribe them myself, and I am not a native speaker.MarkRJones1970 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 13, 2021 4:16 pm It just makes me wonder now, while I'm reading the book, if that was what was actually said or someone's approximation. I don't want to read someone else's guess. I want to read what was actually said.
And the task of transcribing studio chit-chat is so much more complex than in the case of what is sung by a singer on well-known studio recordings. In another example, I work on assembling the complete run of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" sessions - more than 3 hours of studio takes and chit-chat. A guy did a partial transcription of Brian Wilson talk on the tapes, but it is incomplete, and likewise, I was able to make it a bit better in certain instances. All I can say it takes lot of time and effort, and obviously the capability of a transcriber. And if there is a deadline to a project, like with GB book, it can be expected that the end results would not be 100% true.
There is another obstacle - low qualification of workers. I have a book where the author, it seems, dictated the text to tape, and whoever transcribed the tape was just clueless about the names of rather prominent people mentioned by him - it was hysterical, reading these approximations while knowing full well what the author meant. Hopefully there's none of this in GB book.