The Transcription Bottleneck is a metaphor that is often used to describe the problem that large amounts of digital audio and video language recordings from language documentation projects are only available in the original audio or video format.
the recordings in digital language archives are often accompanied by some metainformation that includes, for example, information about authors, speakers, origin, or source of the material but, crucially, transcriptions of the audio or video material are not available or existent for most of the archived recordings, neither linguistic annotations or even translations.