thanks zhen. There's always room, but I appreciate the sentiment behind your kind wishes. :)

Agreed, Barbs, great idea. Might finally have a go at one of the 30sec slots having shied away from a whole lesson in the past! I'm also beginning to understand better how you achieved that astounding post-count this month! ;-)

thanks mate. I wouldn't call it an achievement...it tends to draw some negative attention from time to time, hehe...so I'm just glad the community board only shows the latest post from a thread. The thing is, myself and other transcribers have in the past talked about doing a joint effort on some transcripts, but that was never organised or got off the ground. I suddenly had this idea that if I just set them out into 30 seconds [ I thought even a full minute might be a bit daunting for someone new to it, but who couldn't give 30 seconds a shot? ...or even put in a few words from that 30 second slot?....I thought this way it would be more inviting and hoped it would encourage more to get involved. I also would like to keep up some transcribing, but having done one at each level am running out of motivation to do whole transcripts] slots...had the post up and ready to go, then it would be easier and more inviting for poddies to jump in and give it a shot. I'm very happy for anyone to follow my format [or a different format if so desired] and set up other poddie transcript collaboration threads for other lessons.

I did my transcript in Word and then copied it into CPod. I shrank both windows (Word and i-Tunes) so they each fit on the screen and then I could go back and forth without minimizing them. I would listen to a bit of the dialogue - generally a sentence, pause it and then type it in Word. (Don't try typing in Word without pausing first. You won't be able to keep up and then you'll have to go back and rewind constantly, which is a pain.) After typing, I'd then go back to i-Tunes and do this again - listen to a sentence, pause, type it into Word. At the end I went back to the beginning and double checked to make sure I got everything right. It went pretty quickly.

This is my first time transcribing anything, so other people might have better tricks. Hope this helps!

I find trying to type in Word to be a tedious process. Perhaps it is just that I don't know what I am doing. Could I suggest that it might be easier to type here:

http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/ime.html

before copying it across to Word.

I've always been a very slow transcriber so you may not want my tips, but what I use to listen to the audio is the pop-up player, provided on the lesson page. I just make that pop-up window as small as possible, shove it in the corner of my screen out of the way, as I type on Word.

I downloaded Sogou and use that (and sometimes the Windows pinyin IME) to type characters. It's no different than using the web IME you provided. Using this, it's very easy to type in Chinese in Word and to switch quickly between this and English (I've got it set to change by pressing the "Shift" key - which is kind of annoying and I might change it). This is much faster than first typing the English in Word, then just the Chinese in the web IME, and then copying it into Word.

"In other words, where do I write my transcript?"

..I'm a little wary of doing it in word, though I note cinnamonfern is doing it without problems. It has caused formatting problems and even some crazy posts in the past. Maybe that has been resolved. Personally I do it in Google documents as shown to me by our founder tal, and it has worked fine for me. I gather though this is no longer an option in China? I think tal knew of some other good sites. I think there are many other programs you could do it in. Even email it to yourself.

As for technique, I do pretty much what cinnamonfern describes. I open the lesson in windows media player, and then also open google docs [read...wherever it is you're doing your transcribing], then right click on my taskbar and click on show windows stacked, and then drag the windows media player window down as short as possible [this way it has the full width of my screen so rewinding is more accurate, but it's taking a minimum of vertical real estate ]. I then listen to a sentence, pause wmp, type out the sentence, rewind back a little for continuity and then keep going. This works for me, but I'm sure there are other ways that work better for others. Good luck and if I can help, please let me know :)

I don't know if it was something I was doing but I had always found GoogleDocs to be really frustrating to work in. SoHo Writer may have been a little easier, I didn't really get the chance to try it out.

I have no formatting problems with Word, as long as I convert the finished document into an RTF file then copy and paste from that. I think you could also probably convert into an even simpler text format and copy and paste from that.

thanks for the tips zhen. I'll keep that in mind.

Thank you cinnamonfern, whatyamacallit, zhen and baba - I'm glad I asked this question. Sorry I 'stepped out' and missed all the discussion here - just first day back in China with lots to do, and also trying to equip my iPod touch (which reminds me I still don't have a Chinese dictionary on it - any recommendations?) After managing to buy a new power cord for an old computer, and order a particular presently unavailable brand of yoghurt at the local supermarket (! - I plain forgot that people do such things here, and was taken aback when the 服务员 said 预订吗？why of course), I'm feeling that I should continue my education and develop transcription skills. :)

No - I don't think I can use google docs any more, haven't checked in a while.

Go for it! Nerds are cool!

cinnamonfern,

oh of course...yeah I should have put a link to the lesson in the initial transcript post. That has been done before but I forgot. I should be able to edit that and put it in. Sounds like your typing the transcript elsewhere so you have a copy of all your good work which is a wise idea.

oh, I forgot to add, don't stop yourself [unless you want to]. The whole point is to do as much or as little as you feel like. Doesn't matter if there is some doubling up. Also there are so many other lessons at every level we can tackle...anything goes I say. Just great if we have involvement to any extent from as many as possible. And yeah, it's gotta be fun. Cheers :)