Reporting for New Understanding

When talking about reporting and transcription, the discussion often turns to accuracy and faithfulness: the quality of a report or transcript is measured by how close it is to the original speech.

In this view, the written report is often seen as something less than the reported speech. By transforming time-bounded interaction into a material artefact, many aspects of speech are unavoidably lost. These include the tone of voice, prosody and pauses, as well as visual features such as material settings, clothing, gestures, postures and expressions of the speakers. Editing the text towards the written standard language, which is usually done at least to some degree, may also distance the report from the original speech.

However, a written report is not just an imitation of speech. With its particular characteristics, writing always also adds something to the report. This is often left unnoticed, or taken for granted, but is none the less significant for readers, and even the community.

Speech is fleeting by nature: now it’s here, and then it’s gone. What remains is whatever is stored in the memory of participants. The same is true of listening to audio and video recordings, even though they can be used to repeat the same speech mechanically.

Writing, on the other hand, is an object that is observed visually. Cognitively, this is very different from processing the acoustic information of speech. The reader can linger in the text and think about it thoroughly, move back and forth to browse prior sections that seem relevant to the current one and even make notes in the margins, and so forth.

This enables, in a sense, a more analytic and systematic reception than engaging in spoken interaction. By doing so, it might even transform our perception and experience of the reported speech event. At best, an active reading process can be a creative participation that leads to new discoveries.

This special quality of written text applies to reading written reports and transcripts as well. By reading the speech, instead of listening to it, we might perceive something in it that we would otherwise miss.  In other words, written reporting and transcription can make us engage differently with the speech, which might grant us new understanding of it. We just need to grasp the opportunity.

This issue brings us many new perspectives on professional reporting and transcription. The first articles discuss the use of AI (artificial intelligence) and ASR (automatic speech recognition) in reporting. Dan Kerr tells us how the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, Canada, switched to using a new, open source ASR system to develop their own solution called Parrot. He also discusses the role and responsibilities of human editors in the AI-based work process. Tatsuya Kawahara, Yyua Akita and Mikitaka Masuyama, on the other hand, describe a technological solution that is used to make quick, high-quality captions for parliamentary meetings based on their official transcripts. Henk-Jan Eras gives us a general look into the recent developments of generative AI in the context of parliamentary reporting, discussing disinformation, threats to quality and credibility, and the EU’s recent AI Act. He also presents results from a survey that shows that more than half of responding parliaments use AI tools in parliamentary reporting.

Reporting and transcription are also invaluable tools for accessibility. In her article, Anneke Faaij-Nulle introduces us to the different methods that the Parliamentary Reporting Office of the House of Representatives in the Netherlands has used to increase the accessibility of its parliamentary sessions. As new innovations, she presents two interesting pilot projects: short video reports and podcasts that cover parliamentary debates with simple language which is easily followed by people with limited language skills. Eero Voutilainen and Riikka Kuronen, in turn, present results from a survey study on how the parliaments of Europe provide text alternatives for video recordings on their public websites.

The last three articles examine different reporting principles. Kristján Sigurðsson argues that, because of necessary editing, there are certain limitations in using parliamentary reports as data for linguistic and rhetorical research. Lauri Haapanen reacts to an earlier Tiro article by Andrew Hill about shorthand in journalism (issue 2/2024) and aims to show that there are good reasons to edit direct quotations in certain journalistic texts. Finally, in his regular column, Carlo Eugeni discusses the notion of linguistic relativity – the close relationship between language and thinking – and contemplates what implications it might have for the nature of reporting and transcription. In doing so, he highlights the distinctions among various types of reporting.

Eero Voutilainen is Tiro’s editor-in-chief.