Stenotype

In order to pass the United States Registered Professional Reporter test, a trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury charge, and testimony, respectively.

[1] Some stenographers can reach up to 375 words per minute, according to the website of the California Official Court Reporters Association (COCRA).

Multiple keys are pressed simultaneously (known as "chording" or "stroking") to spell out whole syllables, words, and phrases with a single hand motion.

The first shorthand machine (the word "stenotype" was not used for another 80 years or more) punched a paper strip and was built in 1830 by Karl Drais, a German inventor.

In New York City on December 24, 1875, John Celivergos Zachos invented a stenotype and filed patent number 175892 for type writers and phenotypic notation application.

They translate stenotype to the target language internally using user-specific dictionaries, and most have small display screens.

These factors influence the price, along with economies of scale, as only a few thousand stenotype keyboards are sold each year.

The system is roughly phonetic; for example the word cat would be written by a single stroke expressing the initial K, the vowel A, and the final T. To enter a number, a user presses the number bar at the top of the keyboard at the same time as the other keys, much like the Shift key on a QWERTY-based keyboard.

However, it is not uncommon for students and reporters to add a significant number of entries to a stock dictionary, usually when creating briefs of their own.

The widespread use of realtime translation of the strokes has increased the demand for scopists to work simultaneously with the court reporter.

also used for words spelled with oa to disambiguate certain homophones, like road (RAOD) vs. rode (ROED) The following example shows how steno paper coming out of the machine represents an English sentence.

There is one NCRA-approved school in all of Canada that teaches stenotype: the captioning and court reporting program at NAIT (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology).

[25] In addition to the above American Stenotype layout of STKPWHRAO*EUFRPBLGTSDZ used internationally (Ward Stone Ireland 1913), there is also a Possum Palantype system still being used in the UK.