Stuff and Things

(pic by u/ford_expedition on reddit, labeling mine)

this is a stenography machine! not mine, but with the same layout. these little fucks cost multiple thousands of dollars and break at the slightest gust of wind. truly the horse of the keyboard world… but anyways. why the hell does it look like that

the keyboard is divided into three parts: the left hand side (STKPWHR) is for the beginning of a syllable, the vowels in the middle (AOEU) are vowel sounds, and the right hand side (FRPBLGTSDZ) is for the end of a syllable. to write something, you press all the keys needed simultaneously, like playing a piano! this is MUCH faster than typing letters individually, which is how court reporters are able to get speeds of 250+ WPM and keep up with live conversations.

on top of that, machine shorthand is phonetic— meaning you’re not typing out the individual letters of a word, you’re typing the sound each syllable makes. a hard C like in “crack” becomes K, the S in “as” becomes a Z, and so on and so forth. this eliminates a lot of confusion when transcribing the hell language that is english.

however! you have probably noticed that these are not all of the letters in the english language, even if you’re writing phonetically! it’s not even all the letters in the phrase “english language! this is because god hates me.

okay fine the real reason is to save more time. court reporters don’t look down at their hands while typing (why would you, when the keys aren’t even labeled) and fatfingering the wrong key is kind of a nightmare in an official court setting. so, a steno machine has to have as few keys as possible so you can transcribe accurately while keeping your hands mostly stationary.

to make sounds that don’t exist on the keyboard directly, you type combinations of keys that the computer will translate automatically. for example, beginning TK pressed together will translate to a D sound, and ending BG will translate to a K. it’s a LOT of rote memorization, and when written out longhand like i do it’ll make words look a lot longer than they actually are, but in practice it’s pretty fast! it gets to the point where you can forget the individual letters that make up every combo cos your hands just go to the correct position automatically.

so! all that being said! time to translate my gibberish! i wrote out the sentence from my original post here:

notes:

capital vowels are pronounced as the long version (day, cone, beef, bike) and lowercase are the short version (cat, dog, bed, pit)

words in parenthesis are “briefs” which are shortcuts for common words or phrases. the letters that make them up don’t necessarily translate to any relevant sounds

i write asterisks as + when writing by hand cos they get blobby otherwise

i corrected a mistake for one of the words (abg-shul-ae > abgls-ae)

words like “decide” “destress” or “design” are written with the S in front of the D for speed reasons

so, using the phonetic translation we can see that the sentence actually says: “I live in fear of the day someone decides to actually decrypt these”

and there you have it! this is an extremely condensed version of how machine shorthand works— and i still doubt anyone could translate my steno without a cheat sheet and a lot of time. it took me two years to become even slightly okay at it, and i had the motivation of student loans!

before anyone asks: while court reporting/realtime transcription is a lucrative job with guaranteed job security and low education cost, i do not recommend going to court reporting school unless you’re extremely motivated and don’t have any other obligations. i was an unemployed fulltime student with access to adhd meds and i burnt out so hard im still recovering a year later. it is BRUTAL. you have to dedicate multiple hours a day to extremely repetitive exercises that do NOT pay off quickly. you will want to kick your machine to pieces every day until you graduate and then probably long after.

however! if you’re interested in learning steno, there are multiple open source teaching programs & keyboards available to hobbyists!

opensteno.org is a great resource, i highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested in learning. even if you don’t/can’t get official certification, learning machine shorthand is incredibly useful. i personally find typing on a steno keyboard to be much more comfortable than a qwerty keyboard as someone with chronic joint problems. it’s also just fun!

and no, video/audio recordings and AI transcriptions are not going to replace human court reporters any time soon :)