Open Educational Resources
Document Type
Lesson Plan
Publication Date
2026
Abstract
This lesson plan introduces undergraduate students to the critical review of machine-generated podcast transcripts as part of an archival translation project. Using a Spanish-language episode of CUNY’s Indoor Voices podcast, archived on JSTOR, students examine the role of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in creating transcripts and consider its benefits and limitations.
Students compare the machine-generated transcript with the original audio, identify and correct transcription errors, and make editorial decisions about features of spoken language such as pauses, fillers, false starts, self-corrections, punctuation, and code-switching. The activity also asks students to consider how accent, pronunciation, linguistic variation, and available training data may affect ASR accuracy.
The lesson emphasizes careful listening, research, and human judgment. Students use tracked changes to document their revisions and reflect on patterns they observe in the ASR output. Because the revised transcript will later serve as the source text for an English translation, the activity also demonstrates the importance of establishing an accurate source before beginning translation.
Designed for courses in Spanish, translation and interpreting, digital humanities, or related fields, the lesson combines critical work with primary sources and AI literacy and encourages students to approach machine-generated text critically while working directly with CUNY archival materials.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
Language Interpretation and Translation Commons, Other Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons, Spanish Linguistics Commons
Comments
This lesson plan was created as a part of the 2026 Archives and Open Knowledge Faculty Fellowship, funded by the Cultivating Archives and Institutional Memory Project with the aim of integrating CUNY archival materials into classroom instruction and research. The Fellows served as teaching ambassadors for CUNY’s archival collections, spreading interest among other faculty and their students. Through guided work with CUNY history primary sources, students will gain knowledge in the use of historical records in their scholarship.