The Voice to Text Transcript:
“Hello, my name is Julia Mac Isaac and this is the story of how it moves to Canada in 2010 I was 19 years old and I decided to go study abroad in Vancouver. The reason I chose Vancouver was because I could have work and study Visa at the same time for some reason. The agency I was working with in my city of Brazilia only had that visa if you were going to Vancouver and not other cities like Toronto or Quebec At the time I was finishing my first semester of university in Brazil I was I was studying journalism after the first term I had kind of decided that it wasn’t really for me at the time they had just decided in Brazil that to be a journalist, you didn’t even have to have a journalism degree and it was also very focussed on politics because Brazil is the capital of Brazil. So at the time it was a little bit lost career wise. So it was a good time for me to go abroad and, you know, have some more life experiences to figure out what I wanted to do long-term career wise so that’s how I decided to go. The idea was for me to spend only nine months. My visa was for nine months study and work permit as I mentioned so I moved in September 2010 and shortly after I started working as a server and a hostess in a Brazilian restaurant. I feel very lucky that I was able to get. My first job in Canada which was part-time. And then I studied part-time as well, all in downtown Vancouver. So I did that for about seven months and then decided to go into more more of an advanced class in my English school to study for the Tel, which is the equivalent to aelt, which is a study, a profic English proficiency, test for you to show to universities that, you know, you’re a certain level for your English. proficiency. So I started doing that course, and I realized, oh, ah, because I’m gonna do the T fill, I could actually use this to reply to a university in Canada, so that just came up as an idea and then I started doing some research just to look into a little bit, see if that was an option, um and at the time I was making okay money um as a server. It was basically my one of my first jobs ever. So I just kind of felt like I had a lot of money even though in hindsight, that’s not really true, but that’s how I felt at the time that I had some purchasing power and could help my parents maybe pay for my tuition. So I started looking into different programs and in that process, the idea popped up of maybe going to university in Canada and that would look really good on my resume once I returned to to Brazil. The idea was to potentially do university or college in Canada and then return home and find a job in Brazil long story short I did end up ultimately applying for Capellano University, for their bachelors of business administration. And one of the reasons I decided to go with that program was because it was a university and on top of that, a bachelor’s program, you can kind of do the first two years and then um you decide your major. That was the case at Capellano and that really was attractive to me because I had no idea what I really wanted to do. So a bachelor’s degree has a lot of different majors that you can go into so that gave me a lot of options, which was really interesting to me and yeah, that’s kind of how I ended up moving to Canada. After that, I got a study visa to complete my four years of bachelor degree and business administration. I ended up majoring in human resources management and, you know, after studying in English and working in English for sorry, living in Canada for many years, I ended up making the decision to apply for permanent residency, which was approved, and shortly after I met my husband, got married and a few years ago, got my Canadian citizenship”
How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
Written English would be presented in a more structured and organized manner. The transcription contains errors in punctuation, including periods and commas, and it does not have paragraph breaks. Additionally, the language used sounds more conversational and informal. For example, I used expressions such as “ended up” and “kind of felt like”. I have also said “um” a few times, which was picked up by the transcribing tool. This type of text would normally not be used in formal written English.
What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?
Due to this being a transcript, there are also some words that were transcribed incorrectly. For instance, “Brazilia” should have been written as “Brasilia” and “Capellano” should have been “Capilano”. As a non-native English speaker, my accent may have made it more difficult for the tool to transcribe accurately. Additionally, I noticed that I repeated a word in the audio, which resulted in that word being repeated in the voice-to-text transcript.
However, overall, I thought the tool (Voice Memos app) did a fairly decent job of transcribing the audio provided. I thought the simple language used could be helpful for readers to understand the story I was trying to convey. On the other hand, the errors in punctuation and lack of structure may be a barrier for readers. An information dump can confuse them, and readers benefit from breaks in the text.
What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?
The most common would have to be the errors in punctuation and words being transcribed incorrectly. I consider them mistakes because proper punctuation is important for readability. The location of a comma, for example, can completely change the meaning of a sentence.
As I mentioned earlier, there were also words that were transcribed incorrectly, which could also confuse readers. Below are some additional examples:
- Tel = TOEFL
- aelt = IELTS
What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
In my opinion, the story would have been more “fluffed up” and sounded more inspirational than if I told the story verbally. I would have organized the paragraphs and used proper punctuation, which would have made the text easier to read and more engaging. Because there is more time to perfect the writing, I believe more details would have been shared that didn’t come to mind when the story was recorded. I could have been more precise about the shared dates and included additional nuances that influenced the decision to move to Canada permanently.
In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
Oral storytelling differs from written storytelling because it’s often more informal and conversational. Another difference is that a lot is communicated through body language, such as facial expressions, as well as the person’s tone of voice, pauses and expressions when telling a story.
To convey a similar story, writers must make a significant effort to use proper punctuation to ensure clarity and engagement. However, there is also an opportunity to share additional details about the story while using proper grammar and organization. As Gnanadesikan (2011) notes, “Writing is generally done more deliberately than speaking, so finished written pieces are much more carefully crafted than a typical spoken sentence” (pg. 5).
References
Gnanadesikan, A.E. (2011). The first IT revolution. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet (pp. 1-12). John Wiley & Sons.