Today we went to the Veritas Transcription Center. They have the contract to provide transcripts for the court proceedings in Cape Town. She explained the process of providing transcripts to the courts and some of the difficulties she encounters. The fact there are 11 recognized languages would make it impossible for a steno reporter to provide a transcript. There are interpreters for most of the languages, but a witness could speak in English, Africaans, or Xhosa without an interpreter, and sometimes they use word from both languages in the same sentence. That makes transcribing very difficult.
Iris explained to us that they do not e-mail the .wav files of the transcripts to the typists because the internet is very expensive here. They pay by the megabyte for Internet usage. They also pay per e-mail. We thought it was just the hotels making money with their hourly Internet rates. We can only surmise that the infrastructure isn’t in place here for the Internet service we are used to in the United States.
We had a nice lunch at the Waterfront, enjoyed some of the warmer weather, and then headed to the High Court of Cape Town. This was very similar to the court in Johannesburg we saw. There was a “stenographer” who gave us a tour. Her job was to monitor the tapes in the main control room.
Tonight was our farewell dinner. It was at a beautiful restaurant called the Opal Lounge. The atmosphere was great -- we had a private room with candle lighting. It was very African eclectic. . The food was fabulous, the company even better. Since this was our last night and those of us continuing on to Kruger had to be downstairs at 4:30 a.m., there were lots of hugs and good byes. What wonderful memories and friendships we will all have.