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Anyone who has watched court proceedings, either in real life or on TV will have seen the reporter, most often sitting in front of, or to the side of the presiding judge, furiously tapping away at a typewriter. This is the court reporter, who records everything that is said during the session on the machine. But it isn’t a typewriter, not in the way you probably know them anyway.
The machine is called a stenotype, and does work a bit like a typewriter even if it isn’t one. It has a modified 22 button keyboard instead of the familiar QWERTY we’re all used to. The keyboard has a long number row, just like a normal keyboard, but has two rows of 22 consonant keys across the middle. Instead of the mix of vowels and consonants, the vowels A, E, O and U are set in front of the consonants.
Entire words can be spelled out by pressing all the corresponding keys at once. The left hand will spell out the beginning of a syllable and the right will finish it off. It doesn’t print in English though, but a kind of machine code. This code will then be translated after the session has ended. Newer stenotypes are much cleverer and translates as it goes.
The court reporter, or stenographer spells words phonetically, and there are special spelling conventions to learn, such as there being no “M” on the keyboard. To get an M, the court reporter has to use P and H together. There is no B on the left so they can’t begin a word with B, they need to use P and W together. All these conventions, and many more are taught at court reporting school. Much attention is given to properly learning stenography, as even in this digital age, it’s still the primary method of recording legal proceedings.
The exact construction of the record differs according to the court reporter, or the school who taught them. There are many ways to create these records, and each reporter will have a personal dictionary which they use to translate the code back into English. Nowadays these dictionaries can be loaded onto a stenotype on a USB key so the machine knows exactly what everything means for a particular stenographer.
In the pre-digital era, the stenotype would output onto a narrow ribbon of paper tape, which would be translated from court type into plain English. This translation would then be proofed by a “Scopist” who was another stenographer before being submitted as an official record. Now the newer machines record everything digitally and translates as it goes. The court reporter still needs to know their special typing skills though, as the keyboard still has the same layout it always has, and words are still constructed using their particular method.
The future of the stenotype is limited though, as the newer “Stenomask” is slowly becoming more common. This is a microphone in a special mask into which the court reporter dictates the proceedings into a recorder, which is then typed out using speech recognition software.
We all know how slowly the judicial system moves, so it will be a while yet before stenotypes disappear entirely, but that time will come.
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