Listen And Familiarize Different Accents Of NonEnglish Dictators

By Raj | Dec 8, 2008

English is pronounced differently in different parts of the world with phonetics something similar to the native language (mother tongue) of the speaker; a particular accent essentially reflects a person’s linguistic background. Medical transcriptionists, especially those transcribing for multi-bedded hospitals, come across all sorts of accents that sometimes we go crazy in identifying a word because of the way in which some words are pronounced by the non-English native speakers. Every other doctor speaks with a different accent.

I have a doctor from the Middle East who adds all noises like ummm, aaahh, uhhhh to the words that many times I find it difficult to differentiate the word and these sounds. Similarly, earlier I had two Indian doctors, one giving more stress to the vowel “O” and the other reading the words with the alphabet “O” as “A.” The first one reads words like “office” and “college” as “uufice” and “coolege” and the other one something like “aafice” and “caalage.”

I have a third one now from some African country, who is not crispy speaking out words that any word with “T” or “D” will be heard as “th” or “dh.”

Won’t it be a good idea if we can prepare ourselves by anticipating what we can hear from the non-English doctors if we know their origin/nativity? For eg., how would it be if the following paragraph is read by different people with different linguistic background?

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

Before you can listen to it, you need to have QuickTime player in your system; if you do not have it, download and install QuickTime Player.

If you know the language or nativity of your doctor, you can choose the voice file by browsing by language of the speech accent archive of George Mason University. If you are not sure on how to start, go to the home page of speech accent archive and start from there on how to use that site or search the speech accent archive. Listen and familiarize different nonEnglish dictators’ accents which could help you out as one of the blank filling techniques. Have fun and enjoy.

2 Responses to “Listen And Familiarize Different Accents Of NonEnglish Dictators”

jeanette on August 20th, 2009, at 2:50 am said:

where do I find the answer to my question from you I was updated through my email but can’t find your answer, about will there ever or is there a machine that the dr can speak to and it type’s out his entire transcription with all the right spelling and puncuation needed if so, why would they need us to do transcription for them ? also a dr told me he no longer uses a transcriber becauses he fax’es his paper work what do’es he mean?

Raj on August 20th, 2009, at 3:53 am said:

1.) I think the machine that you’re speaking about is speech recognition softwares like Dragon Naturally Speaking which types on its own whatever the doctor speaks. However, the output of such speech recognition softwares are not 100% accurate, where you need transcribers to rectify those errors.

2.) Don’t know if in the second case the doctor writes the reports on his own and then faxes them to the required people.