ESL Dictator Trying Hard to Sound Like an American

ESL is an acronym that means "English as a second language." So expect ESL dictators to sound everything but American.

The problem lies when the speaker tries to speak with an American accent. They more often than not end up badly mispronouncing words. They try to speak faster thinking that it was better to do so, perhaps in an effort to emulate their native American colleagues' manner of talking.

Honestly, it would be much easier if the ESL dictator syllabicated each word deliberately rather than slurring the syllables like most Americans who sound like they're lazy to pronounce the words and squeeze a five-syllable word into one syllable. A far cry from your favorite Fox News reporter, I must say.

One of my favorite ESL dictators is a male physician of Hispanic descent. He usually comes up with a decent dictation even while retaining his native accent: the long and overly emphasized letter 'R' similar to the way most Japanese would pronounce the letter 'L.' My major problem here is his grammar. I once tried to correct it, and my boss told me not to because it will offend him. Then I checked one of my edited files; the editor had apparently corrected the physician's grammar.

There goes another of my woes. The editors themselves do not agree on a single standard even if they worked on the same doctor under the same account. I will blog about it in a future post.

Intellectually-challenged Editor

At the office, there are MTs and editors. The MT does the transcribing, while the editor cleans up the transcript in terms of making sure that the client specs are followed to the letter.

Well, the correct templates and fonts should be used, and the spelling and grammar have to be error-free. Because the MT has a quota to meet, the race against time can cause errors, hence the need for editors. Some of them are really good; however, there are editors who refuse to think, most likely because they do not understand what is being said or simply do not have the IQ or even common sense. All they care about is what their ears tell their brains. Perhaps it's because they spent years memorizing all those body parts, medical words, and the like without really understanding what they've been trying to learn.

Here's a quote from an edited file. Note the tense inconsistency, then try make some sense out of this sentence:

"Unfortunately, he did not require any hospitalization nor developed any febrile illnesses in the interim."

You mean the doctor or whoever dictated this wants the patient to end up in the hospital or have some kind of fever? Hmm ... sounds like a hospital stockholder, a sadist, or both.

First Post

Yes, this is my first ever post for this blog. I've been trying to hold it off for the longest time, thinking that my woes would disappear or ease somewhat. I was wrong.

What's an MT? It's an acronym for a lot of things, but to me it means medical transcriptionist. That's my work. I transcribe audio files dictated by a health professional: an MD, an RN, or a PA-C.

You may think that the medical terminologies and the drugs (both generic and brand names) make the job difficult. Wrong. It's the way the words are spoken that compound an MT's woes.

For some reason many of these people with impressive titles attached to their names cannot pronounce certain words properly. Imagine a kid who's trying to learn how to say a newly-learned word, something rarely or never been used.

What makes life more difficult for MTs is the fact that these health professionals end up saying such words as fast as they can, perhaps to cover up the fact that they can't say the word properly. To make things worse, errors in the transcript are blamed on the MT.