Specialist software allows participants in court hearings or depositions to make notes in the text and highlight portions for future reference.
Specific careers include the following: Before the advent of the stenotype machine, court reporters wrote official trial transcripts by hand using a shorthand system of stenoforms that could later be translated into readable English.
Walter Heironimus was among the first stenographers to make use of the stenotype machine during his work in the U.S. District Court system in New Jersey in 1935.
As a result, machine translation (MT) intended to serve as a solution for preventing ER from potentially replacing reporters' jobs.
However, MT relied heavily on human labors operating behind the system and many started to question if it should be the right way to end the "transcript crisis."
Then Patrick O'Neill, a skilled and experienced court reporter, stayed to work on the stenotype-translation project with CIA and developed the prototype CAT system.
Additionally, the deaf and the hard-of-hearing communities can also participate in the judicial process with the help of real-time transcriptions provided by court reporters.
After graduation, court reporters can choose to further pursue certifications to achieve a higher level of expertise and increase their marketability during a job search.
For example, the presence of many diphthongs and triphthongs in Spanish requires certain sounds to be distinguished that would not be present in transcribing English into shorthand.
[11] These instances may cause a disruption of reliability in the final real-time transcription, which could influence how the written utterance is seen as an evidence for a court-case.
It is important to note that any transcription is an interpretation of the speech no matter how detailed it is, and will be selective in what it can include, leaves out and ultimately convey to the reader.
Besides phonetic differences that may lead to misinterpretation, transcribers also have to consider the nuanced social and emotional meanings that are specific to the speaker at the time and or the culture surrounding the dialect.
This example from J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (1984) shows the dilemma of doubt in accuracy of interpreting a dialect in the final transcript.