How I make transciptions. How accurate are they?

I am transcribing articles by reading them into the voice recognition program, Dragon Naturally Speaking. I then correct any errors which I spot that the program has made. I pay particular attention to retain the exact spelling used by the Times for persons names, and place names. However, I am much less strict on other matters of spelling, punctuation, and formatting. I make no attempt to retain the original spelling of most ordinary words, e.g. where the C19 Times would spell recognize, I freely use my preferred C21 spelling recognise.

Furthermore Dragon Naturally Speaking does not recognise my speech perfectly and often substitutes another word or words which sound somewhat like the original but which it thinks fits the context better! This is quite disconcerting when one reads through some transcibed Times English and then comes across an obvious mistake. I do read through every article after dictating it and correct all such errors which I notice. Nethertheless, it is probable that I have missed some.

Worse than the obvious error, is the less obvious one where the wrong word makes sense but actually has changed the meaning entirely. To be regarded as a relaible secondary or tertiary source a transcription has to be accurate. I therefore caution all readers that the transcriptions as presented are not guranteed to be perfect, their prime purpose is to provide a reasonably accurate transcription freely available over the Web in order to enable readers to get a genral familiarity with the content of an article in The Times. If it is important for you to confirm the accuracy, please do so by consulting the original article. Rather than spend my time in lengthy proof reading and produce very highly accurate transcripts, I have judged it more useful to spend time in making more transcripts of very slightly lower quality. But I will offer to any reader who does not have access to an archive of The Times, that I will carefully recheck any detail or whole article which he wishes to be able to quote exactly for his work, or I may be able to supply a scanned copy of the original. Just email me.