The Seven-Second Gap and the Witness Who Speaks Bad Grammar
You are reporting a personal injury trial in DuPage County. The plaintiff's vocational economist testifies quickly. In one answer he says 'fifteen thousand dollars'; in the next answer he says '50,000.' Your realtime notes show 15,000 in the first answer, but you are not certain, and the courtroom audio drops for about seven seconds at the same moment that opposing counsel objects mid-answer and the witness keeps talking over the objection. Later, the witness says, 'He don't know nothing about my training.' Counsel then reads a text message aloud as 'Your not going to believe this.' The witness spells her surname on the record as 'S-C-H-U-L-T-Z,' but the caption, her curriculum vitae and every prior pleading use 'Schulz.' At the end of the day the judge asks whether the transcript will be ready for the instruction conference the next morning.
1. How do you transcribe 'He don't know nothing' and the text message, and do you add '[sic]'?
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The witness's grammar. Transcribe it exactly: 'He don't know nothing about my training.' The reporter is not an editor, and a witness's grammar is part of the evidence - it can bear on education, capacity and credibility, and an appellate court is entitled to see how the witness actually spoke. Resist the urge to 'upgrade' testimony.
The [sic] question. Use [sic] sparingly and consistently. Its function is to flag an error in quoted written material so the reader knows the error is in the source, not in the transcription. For live testimony, many Illinois reporters do not add [sic] to grammatical slips at all, because it editorializes and spotlights the witness; verbatim transcription already preserves the error. If you adopt [sic] as house style, apply it uniformly across all speakers, including the judge and counsel, or the transcript looks like it is grading one side.
The text message. Counsel announced the words but did not announce punctuation. Render the message in quotation marks as read: 'Your not going to believe this.' If the error (your for you're) appears in the message itself, [sic] is appropriate, because the error belongs to the document. Verify against the phone or exhibit if one exists.
2. The numbers conflict and the audio has a seven-second gap. What do you do?
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Accuracy on a figure like this one can decide a damages award, so you may not guess and you may not silently pick the number that 'sounds right.'
First, do not send the transcript out with an unverified figure. Mark the page, pull your steno notes and realtime file, and listen to the backup audio. If the gap is genuinely unrecoverable, check the surrounding context (the witness's report, the exhibit the answer refers to, counsel's later reference to the figure) - but treat context as a lead to verify, not as proof.
Second, if the words cannot be recovered, use a neutral notation such as '[inaudible]' or '[?]' rather than a fabricated number, and notify the judge and both counsel in writing before the transcript is certified so they can stipulate, read the record, or correct it by agreement. A stipulated correction on the record is clean; a certified guess is not.
Third, document the gap: the time, the cause and what you did to resolve it. Keep your notes and audio; do not destroy them after transcription, since a challenge to the figure may require you to verify the record.
3. How do you resolve the name discrepancy, and what do you tell the judge about tomorrow morning?
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The name. Transcription convention follows the record: use the spelling the witness gave in open court at the first occurrence - 'Schultz' - because that is what the witness said under oath about her own name. Then reconcile it. If the variance matters (it often does for judgment and identity), a bracketed note at first occurrence is appropriate, for example 'Schultz [as spelled by the witness; caption reads Schulz]', or raise it with the judge on the record so the correction is on the record rather than in a footnote. Do not silently substitute the caption spelling for what the witness said, and do not use both spellings interchangeably throughout; consistency after the first occurrence keeps the index and the appellate record usable.
The deadline. Tell the judge the truth with a specific commitment. If the record has an unresolved seven-second gap and an unverified dollar figure, the transcript should not be certified overnight simply to meet the conference; propose delivering the completed portions and identifying the pages under verification, or ask for the short extension needed to resolve them. A court is generally far more willing to grant a brief extension for an honest verification problem than to confront a certified transcript that turns out to contain a guessed figure.