A court reporter, court stenographer, stenotypist, shorthand reporter, captioner, CART reporter, or deposition reporter all use the same skill: MACHINE SHORTHAND.
Anyone who’s had jury duty has surely been captivated by the person who sits at the front of the courtroom taking down the verbatim record of the trial proceedings. We call that person a court reporter or court stenographer. The skill these highly trained professionals use is known as machine shorthand, or the method of using a stenotype to convert the spoken word into an abbreviated language that can later be converted back into English. This method allows information to be easily archived and later translated for readback or publication. This skill is also used for broadcast captioning or realtime translation services for the deaf and hearing impaired—also known as Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART).
Court reporters are keeps of the official record because they provide an impartial role within the legal process whether that be as deposition reporters during the discovery phase of litigation or providing trial transcripts for appeal. While the term “court reporter” is used universally to describe all of the aforementioned occupations, you may find these professionals on the Congressional floor or at a news press conference.
According to Stenograph, the industry leader in court reporting products, “Miles Bartholomew invented the first successful shorthand machine in 1877. Improvements were later made to the machine and patents were obtained for it in 1879 and 1884. It was manufactured by Bartholomew’s company, the United States Stenograph Corporation of East St. Louis, Illinois, and was used as late as 1937 by official reporters. The ten keys could be depressed one at a time (a letter at a stroke) to create a series of dots and dashes, much like Morse code.”
Modern stenography machines have abandoned the concept of singular finger depression in favor of allowing the user to combine multiple keys into one stroke. In addition, today’s machines have been expanded to 22 keys with an optional number bar. This differs vastly from the QWERTY keyboard on your computer because in machine shorthand words are formed phonetically by selecting several keys in combination, reminiscent of playing a chord on the piano, allowing the stenographer to hit speeds of 225 wpm or faster.
And yet, people often wonder why court reporters exist in our high-tech world. Isn’t there a voice-recognition software that makes this 150-year old art obsolete? Sure. But voice recognition can only handle one voice at a time. If several people speak at once or talk over each other, it becomes difficult to separate the language. Besides, voice recognition isn’t as accurate, especially when it comes to accented speakers, and it often fails to meet the level of consistency that comes with having someone in the room to ask for clarification, to slow things down if conversations get jumbled, or to prompt voices that go too low for the microphone. Depending on state guidelines, court reporters are trained to a 95 to 98 percent degree of accuracy on proceedings of two to four voices (although stenographers can do more as needed). Plus, court reporters have the ability to provide realtime feeds to those in the proceeding so that participants can view the words being captured in the moment.
To learn more about court reporting visit the National Court Reporters Association or read about the fictionalized life of a court reporter in the Victoria Justice Court Reporter Mystery Series.
