Global World Means More Accents (1): Transcriptions and Captions Build Bridges

In the global world, we meet increasingly more people who have accents. Moreover, we collaborate professionally with increasingly more individuals who have peculiar pronunciation peculiar to specific locations and nations. We in the Go Transcript office love accents! Yet, our experience tells us that accents sometimes maybe a bit of a barrier in conveying a message to the broadest audience possible.

We decided to have a closer look at accents and share our insights with you in a series of our blog posts. The first one focuses on accents, their role and challenges, and how transcription and captioning services help many clients. In the next three, we will share our thoughts in addressing accents in the fields of health care, law, and media.

As the theory goes, people may have accents because of various reasons and circumstances. These are locality (regional or geographic accent), socioeconomic status, ethnicity or social class, and merely a phonetic influence of their first language, i.e., foreign accent. Accents make our already diverse world even more exciting and colorful!

Unfortunately, not everyone is a fan of accents. For example, in some cases, people just do not accept it openly. Cornell University researchers concluded that accent might perceivably hurt the organization’s external communication (Beth Livingston, 2014). Some research observes that even in professional setups, accents do negatively impact converting a message and persuading coworkers.

Accent bias is a thing. We are hopeful that it is a diminishing dynamic as our world is global and the most diverse people meet and cooperate.

Meanwhile, we all still meet people or see videos, which excites us or is of great interest. Or when we want to hear other people but face an accent barrier, it is hard to follow the main message.

Solution? Well, we have one.

Although it won’t change the world for now, at Go Transcript, we believe that a lot of communication and valuable audiovisual information transfer can have a higher impact if it has captions. And we strive to do just that with our ethnically diverse yet English-first team of transcribers, we can follow the thickest accents and make transcriptions of the ideas shared by all of our global community.

That does not change the world for now, but we believe that our service brings everyone a bit closer together.