Should I Transcribe My Own Sermons or Outsource to a Transcription Service?

Electronic publishing and the development of digital libraries are just a few of the latest strategies religious organizations are adapting to their “marketing” techniques in addition to traditional hard copy publications. If you are a pastor or a preacher, you may want to jump on the bandwagon and try it out. Sermon transcriptions will help you propagate your faith into a wider audience and give them a chance to participate or build their faith on their own.

To get started, generally, you have two options - either you transcribe your own sermons or outsource to a general transcription service. Now, these two options have their advantages and disadvantages. It's up to you to consider them and try to see which one is best for you. 

Transcribing on your own

The term “Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Transcriptions” is pretty much self-explanatory. It pertains to transcribing your own audio or video files despite having no professional transcriptions training. However, generating good quality transcripts on your own is still possible. Even more so when you yourself have time, patience, and dedication, or when you have extra hands in-house to do transcriptions for you.

You may hear other transcription companies discouraging DIY transcriptions, but you won’t hear that from us. DIY transcription is actually a great option for one-time projects or short recordings, and of course when you have a lot of time to spare for transcriptions. This might actually work well if you are to transcribe a recording of your own sermon or audio notes, as you are already familiar with the recording content. You may even save little to big bucks!

However, regularly transcribing sermons can be laborious, especially when recordings pile up sermon after sermon. DIY transcriptions will eat a huge chunk of your time and it’s no doubt frustrating when you have many other duties on your checklist.

While you may think that transcribing your own sermons or assigning transcription work to your church staff will help lower expenses, keep in mind that there is a significant difference between audio hour and person-hour. Employees are usually paid per hour of actual work, while professional transcriptionists are paid by the hour or minute of the audio no matter how long it took them to transcribe it.

For non-professional transcriptionists, the average time to transcribe an hour-long audio or video file is 6 hours (or more if you do not own proper transcribing equipment). Not to mention synchronizing your transcript to a video file for captioning! That’s a lot of time and resources to sacrifice for menial transcription work.

Outsourcing to a general transcription service

If you simply do not have a lot of extra time and would rather have your staff do tasks they were originally hired to do, outsourcing to a general transcription service is the best way to go! In addition to having the highest possible quality transcripts conveniently delivered to you at your preferred turnaround time, you can hire a general transcription provider willing to go the extra mile to take care of all your sermon transcription needs. In particular, TranscriptionWing is a one stop shop offering various features and services that will ultimately help polish your transcriptions and your work in general. Some of the great features you'll find here in TranscriptionWing are:

• flexible turnarounds
• transcript format customization
• branding
• time stamping
• speaker identification or labeling
• video captioning
• subtitling services
• voice-to-text editing
• translation services

These additional elements might be hard to achieve on your own. However, with TranscriptionWing, you will be able to achieve these and more. Best of all is that you won’t need to put the finishing touches on your sermon transcripts yourself!

In summary, self-transcribing your sermons and outsourcing to a transcription company both have their own ways and levels of practicality. DIY transcriptions can save or cost you more money in certain situations. But hiring a general transcription company is surely the wiser choice for higher quality and more efficient bulk transcripts completion.