Book excerpt: Across a range of institutional settings, ‘practitioners’ and ‘professionals’ are eliciting and capturing spoken talk from ‘clients’ (Sarangi 1998), transcribing that talk, and later repurposing the transcripts in place of the original interaction. This Research Topic seeks both to shed light on this often overlooked institutional process, and to encourage further linguistic input into this area of professional practice. Transcription is almost always an institutional practice (Park & Bucholtz 2009), providing a written record of spoken interaction to be used by another party at a later date, in another setting or context. There are a number of underappreciated features and consequences of this transformational process, which we hope this Research Topic will expose and examine.