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Nuance
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More answers - OP - wordie Posted: Oct 3rd, 2015 - 2:21 pm In Reply to: Tell us more please. I am getting desperate here.. - at the N. Another Wordie.
Yes, IC is different, but it really isn't bad at all. Your tax bill is higher, but you also get a lot of deductions for working out of your home, basically 10% of any payments you make in the house, including rent, mortgage, water, power, insurance, not to mention depreciation and deductions on computer equipment and new stuff bought for work. It's just different, but it doesn't have to be scary.
Right now I'm averaging about $20 gross an hour (probably closer to $14-15 after taxes). It wasn't like that the first couple of months for sure, but as I said each month's check is maybe $40-50 bigger than the previous month, so I am getting noticeably faster as time goes on.
The transcripts I work on are generally very long, on average 2 to 2-1/2 hours, and the deadlines for them are approximately a week. So it's very important you can be self-motivated on a daily schedule as an IC, but for me it varies. Sometimes say during particularly hot weather, I'll want to take care of outside things early and work into the evening. Other times I rise early, work my hours, and have the late afternoons free, but I generally set an amount of audio I want to complete in a day and do that, and that is how I track how I'm getting more productive.
It is very different from mt mostly because of learning how to transcribe multiple speakers, but it is hardly an insurmountable change. I can remember clearly when I suddenly "got it," and my ear had tuned in on how to distinguish the different voices. Just like in MT, there are plateaus of skill we reach as we learn the job.
Sometimes there are not so clear speakers, especially in the criminal hearings, but generally speaking the audio quality and the consciousness of many of the people leading the hearings for a good, clear transcript is galaxies above and beyond what is presented to the average MT to decipher these days.
If you have made good use of using shorts software as an MT, here is a tip. Don't get rid of all those years of shorts, because many are English phrases you will continue to use. What I did was copy my MT shorts library and called the duplicate library Legal. Then as new phrases come up, I create and/or change medical shorts to the new phrases in the duplicated library. Some of the changes from one to the other are quite humorous actually. :)
Good fortune cookie! The one I got the other night said 'About time I got out of that cookie.'
Good luck!
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- Life after Nuance - wordie (Views: 1175, 2015-10-03, 11:50 am)
- Wordie - More thoughts (Views: 780, 2015-10-03, 12:53 pm)
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