Rather like the legions of illegal aliens behind the scenes who chop the vegetables and wash the dishes for New York City's restaurants, there is another invisible underclass, one to which I belong, that performs menial but essential operations upon print for the city's voracious consumers of information and entertainment. These verbal Gastarbeiter are aliens of another sort - impecunious and obscure writers, actors, directors, musicians, and dancers. While we struggle for a better life and a chance to show our worth, we support ourselves in part-time, night-time, weekend, or other marginal literate occupations - reading proof, processing words, and - my particular métier - transcribing audiocassettes.
Transcribers are certainly more than the automata we resemble as we sit before our keyboards, linked by earphones to dictaphones, one foot on the pedal that admits the voices into our ears. Far from being simply a mechanical occupation that requires fast fingers and good eye-ear-hand coordination, transcribing also requires a special facility with language - both the rudiments, like punctuation and spelling, and a sensitivity to the way words are used so we can anticipate what's coming or guess what was need good general knowledge (and have the opportunity to acquire more) as we make transcripts of such phenomena of the modern age of communications as professional conferences, lectures, business meetings, brainstorming sessions, even wiretaps. Ninety percent of our transcriptions are for television, primarily interviews with experts, celebrities, and other teleworthy subjects.
The very existence of transcribing and proofreading as menial, marginal occupations is an indication of how much our society depends on print and takes it for granted. Reading, if not writing, is as much a routing part of modern lives as breathing or eating. In fact, we often read while eating, certainly while traveling, and frequently while on the toilet. We feel as helpless without a book on our vacation as without a credit card.
To readers born into a tradition of reading it is not immediately evident that generating print - what writers do laboriously and transcribers do automatically and casually - was once a cognitive conceptual leap of staggering magnitude, a miracle of transformation akin to that of the blacksmith who turns raw earth into iron, or the alchemist who changes base metal into gold. Trivial as it may seem, transcribing really is a kind of magic mind - “reading,” if you will. A wordsmith, I transmute spoken utterance into written words, with my fingers convert speech into prose.
Everyone knows that what writers do is magical. They take fleeting, amorphous feelings, ideas, experiences, observations, and imaginings and shape and fix these in enduring, finely wrought, and ornamented literary compositions. But in the lesser legerdemain of transcribing, where impermanent vibrations in an ear are transformed into tangible marks that occupy space, one performs a related kind of magic and, what is more, is privy to an insight that is usually ignored. A transcriber is continually vividly reminded of the differences between the spoken and the written. For what we “write” (i.e., type, as transcribers) rarely looks like anything we write (i.e., compose, as writers) or that anyone reads. A writer who is also a transcriber appreciates every minute how monstrously artificial and contrived a thing writing is, how unlike the spoken idiom that was its
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