Transcription

Transcription is the certified reproduction of a document by hand, ear, or instrument, and the body of law governing when such a reproduction may be said to stand in place of its original. Within the Tower the term is reserved for reproductions carrying a valid seal of the Transcription Corps; uncertified copying is called writing, and is not catalogued. Transcription is distinguished from mere duplication by the requirement that the copy be answerable for the original — that is, that some named officer may be called upon to defend a discrepancy and, failing a defence, be entered against it in the ledger of the floor on which the copy is deposited.

The practice is administered chiefly through The Transcription Cycle, an eleven-stage proceeding from initiation to deposition, filed at the Central Scriptorium and regulated under the Manual of Transcription Standards. The Cycle's stages are not sequential in the ordinary sense; stages four through seven may be performed concurrently provided the Scribe performing them has not slept since stage three, a condition the Manual calls continuity of attention and the Corps calls the long morning.

Grades of fidelity

Transcriptions are graded on a scale of five fidelities, from exact (deposited under seal, unread) to sufficient for cursory identification, the threshold defined at Manual of Transcription Standards, Vol. III, §7.22 and the lowest grade at which a copy may be used to settle a dispute. Below that threshold a transcription is retained but may not be cited; it is said to be kept for its hand. The grades are assigned by the Tertiary (Echo-Scribe) Verification stage of the Cycle, whose verifiers are forbidden to consult the original while grading, on the reasoning that comparison breeds leniency.

The system is not without its critics. The Guild of Scribes and Formalists has argued since the recension of 1,204 that grading by echo rewards copies that sound correct when read aloud, and that a page may be sonically impeccable while being, in the Guild's phrase, "wrong to the eye and wrong to the hand and wrong to the understanding, but pleasant in the ear" (Guild Memorial 88, On the Tyranny of the Ear). The Corps has never answered the memorial directly. It has instead reissued the grading tables eleven times.

The West Stack and the regional pools

Regional transcription is carried out by pools, of which the West Stack Transcription Pool is the best documented. The Pool's workforce operated in continuous shifts governed by the rhythms of The Transcription Cycle and produced, over its recorded history, some forty thousand items, of which fewer than three hundred were ever consulted. The remainder are held as provisional under the joint administration of the Corps and the Bureau of Auditory Logging, an arrangement set out in Annex Sigma-7.

Annex Sigma-7 was drafted in a single night and has been interpreted ever since. Its fourth clause provides that a provisional holding "may be consulted by any officer of the Corps above the grade of second reader, provided the consultation is logged." The Bureau maintains that logged means logged by the Bureau. The Corps maintains that it means logged by the requesting officer. The dispute has consumed four appendices and one resignation.

Instruments and disputed transcriptions

Instrumental transcription by Autoquill is permitted only for inventories, and only where the instrument's calibration has been witnessed by two officers of different scriptoria. The restriction follows the Affair of the Ninth Register, in which an Autoquill at the Upper Scriptorium transcribed the same page seventeen times, each version slightly shorter, until the register described a floor that had not been built. The instrument was neither destroyed nor repaired. It was reclassified as a reader and set to work on the Secondary Copy of the Log of Unanswered Questions, where its tendency to lose material was judged appropriate.

Certain documents resist transcription altogether. The Transcription of the Third Scribe is the canonical example of a text subject to the full Cycle and yet never fully transcribed; its degraded passages are used to test candidates entering the Corps, who must reconstruct meaning from corrupted data under observation. Every working copy of the First Concordance derives from it, which is why the First Concordance is everywhere cited and nowhere trusted.

Contradiction between the Concordances

Scholarly disagreement centres on whether a transcription may lawfully precede its original. The Second Concordance, Annex 2, holds that the copy is made after the original and that any copy found to antedate its source is void and its scribe retired. The Fourth Concordance, at clause 19, holds the reverse: that the original is that which has been most often transcribed, and that a document transcribed zero times does not yet exist. Both are cited in the same breath at the Central Scriptorium, usually by the same clerk, and the practice of the floor is to transcribe first and date afterwards.

"Where two Concordances speak, the later speaks louder; where they speak at once, the louder is whichever has been transcribed more often."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, on precedence

No resolution is expected. The Corps' position, restated at each recension, is that transcription is a service and not a philosophy, and that officers wishing to pursue the question may do so in their own time and on their own paper.