Court Reporting Hardware:
The Steno Machine
By Judy Wolf
What
is
that funny machine?
It's called a steno machine and is used primarily in judicial
settings such as trials, hearing and depositions. It’s also used
for closed captioning live television programs. Unlike a
conventional computer keyboard which allows only one key to be
depressed at a time, a steno machine operator can press a group
of keys at the same time, called a “stroke.” Think of a pianist
striking chords to create complex sounds in rapid succession and
you’ll get the concept of this machine. This writing system
allows operators to write words at the same speed as
they are spoken.
How does it work?
When seeing the steno machine for the first time, the usual
question is: "Where’s the rest of the alphabet? There’s not even
an "I" on the keyboard." The steno machine has a 22-button
keyboard with two rows of consonants and four vowel keys in a
separate row. Because most English syllables begin and end with
consonants and have vowels in the middle, this layout is
perfectly aligned. Court stenographers can write (no, it’s not
called typing) entire syllables and even words or phrases all at
once by striking multiple keys at the same time. The left hand
spells out the beginning of a syllable, while the right hand
spells out the end; all keys are pressed at the same time, and
the machine produces a symbol that’s incomprehensible to anyone
who's not trained in machine
shorthand.
There aren't enough keys on each
side of the keyboard to cover every sound. Certain combinations
of adjacent keys correspond to the missing consonants: For
example, there's no "M" anywhere on the keyboard, so you have to
press "P" and "H" together to start a syllable with that sound.
There is a "B" on the right side of the board, but none on the
left—that means it's easy to end a syllable with "B," but for
words that begin with "B" you need to hit "P" and "W" together.
It’s very easy to hit the two keys together and is much more
efficient that moving your hands across a larger keyboard to
reach keys. This is the major reason that operators can write at
tremendously high speeds for extensive periods of time without
fatigue.
At court reporting school,
operators learn a steno theory, which teaches approaches and
general rules. They learn to write by sound, not by spelling.
They also learn brief forms for things such as “ladies and
gentlemen of the jury” by writing L-A-G, for example; or B-R-J
for ‘best of your knowledge;’ or T-A-T for “at that time.”
In the old days, everything the
operator wrote would print to a roll of narrow paper tape.
Afterward, they would read the paper notes, mentally translate
into text and type a transcript; or read and translate the notes
while dictating the testimony into a tape recorder and having
someone else type the transcript.
For the last 30 years, computers
and modern steno machines, small computers in themselves, have
translated operators’ notes. While in court reporting school,
students receive a digital “personal dictionary,” which has as
many as 300,000 regular words and their corresponding steno
strokes, so they begin using computer-aided transcription at the
very beginning of their training. Operators use different
conventions to represent homonyms or other ambiguous words such
as to/too/two, fore/fore/four, led/lead, etc., as taught in
their theory. As they develop skills, they develop their own
abbreviations, especially for words and phrases particular to
their locale.
Because today’s notebook
computers can translate steno into text as quickly as the
operator writes it, realtime reporting has evolved.
Operators — relieved of the tedium of reading, dictating and/or
typing transcripts — can be significantly more productive. An
offshoot of this technology is called interactive real-time,
where litigation professionals can be connected to the court
reporter’s computer and receive the text as it is spoken through
their own computers.
While real-time text is “rough
draft” quality, it provides quick access to testimony for
preparation for subsequent events. Subsequently, parties receive
a final edited transcript certified by the reporter as the
official record.
Almost all reporters have their
own customized machines, which they take with them on jobs. A
brand-new,
top-of-the-line steno machine costs up to $5,000 and the special
CAT software costs up to $4,000. This initial investment is not
insignificant; but can lead to average annual earnings of
$64,000, according to the
National Association of Court
Reporters.
Unique steno machine keyboards
are available for French, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Greek
and other languages, and are used by court reporters around the
world.
Judy Wolf is a Marketing Product
Manager at Stenograph LLC, located in Mt. Prospect, Ill.
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