All in a day’s work for the FSTL transcription team!
English is the language of the business world. Most publications and communications by global businesses are provided in English as standard.
Here in the UK, English may be our national language but of course how it is spoken is very different, depending on where in the country you are from.
It’s not just words themselves that can vary across the country – such as how some Scottish people refer to a child as a “bairn” – but accents change significantly too. All you need to do is think of the Geordie “why aye man” and you’ll know just what we mean!
But did you know that we already have an accent when we’re babies, before we’ve even said our first word. In fact, an accent can be evident in babies as young as 3 days old?!
A study in 2009 by scientists at the University of Wurzburg in Germany showed that when newborn babies cry, the sound they make mirrors the accent of their mother, suggesting that an accent is formed while the foetus is in the womb. In the study, the scientists measured the frequency, spectrogram and the melody contours of the cries, the normalised cry time and at what stage the cry reached the pitch & melody maximum.
Interestingly, what they discovered was that French babies tended to raise the pitch of their cries toward the end, mirroring the cadence of the French accent. The cries of German babies were completely opposite to that, which mimics their own language.
Researchers believe that a baby’s cry could in fact be the most vital groundwork for language, communication, and the accent with which a baby will later speak.
Being able to understand and correctly transcribe the nuances of an accent – whether that be as a result of a different dialect or because the individual is a non-native English speaker – is of course fundamental when providing accurate transcription of the spoken word. This is where experience comes in, and the transcription team at FSTL has experience in droves.
Our work isn’t limited to within the British Isles. We travel across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the USA to work with our global clients, producing seamless transcripts for them.
Our team have an ear for accents that they’ve developed and honed over the last 25 years, which means they can hit the ground running no matter where the audio recording has come from.
With FSTL, your transcription is always in safe hands.