STENOGRAPHERS employed by an English company are littering court transcripts with mistakes because they are bamboozled by Scots accents, senior lawyers have claimed.

Leading advocates have complained that Scottish names such as Barlinnie have been wrongly transcribed as “Barrel Annie” and that words such as “libelled” and “fanciful” have been replaced with “liable” and “fanciable”.

The errors by staff working for the Devon-based Mendip Media Group, which was awarded the stenography contract by the Scottish Courts Service in 2006, have prompted a flood of complaints by lawyers and judges.

They fear that the mistakes and omissions could affect the outcome of appeals because they are supposed to be an accurate account of what was said during earlier court proceedings.

The matter has been raised by judges with Elish Angiolini, the lord advocate.

Legal sources claim standards have plummeted since the contract, which was previously held by the Glasgow-based firm Hodge & Pollock, was awarded to the English firm.

Recently, Judge Roger Craik complained that a transcript of proceedings in his court was “riddled” with 74 errors. Criticising the work as “highly unsatisfactory”, he suggested another firm should be used.

“The transcriptions are bloody awful,” said Donald Findlay QC, one of Scotland's leading defence barristers. “There are clearly problems [understanding] the accent. There are bits that are either missing or plainly wrong.

“They know nothing of the local topography, which leads to some amazing phonetic translations of places. I would have thought it's not beyond the wit of man to check place names on the internet.

Gordon Jackson QC, the former Labour MSP for Glasgow Govan, said: “I have heard senior judges make some very disparaging remarks about the quality of [Mendip's] work.”

Gerry Considine, vice-chairman of the Glasgow Bar Association, said: “There's a lot of disquiet about the mistakes being made. It never happened before. It appears they can't make out the accents of judges or witnesses and everything being transcribed is riddled with mistakes.”

Last week, Mendip admitted there had been problems but blamed the mistakes on the “atrocious” quality of the recordings being taken in court. It insisted that transcribers based in Scotland had been hired to avoid problems understanding the dialect.

“If we can't hear what's being said, then we can't transcribe it,” said a spokeswoman. “We have raised the issue with the Scottish Courts Service. We have completed hundreds of transcripts and there have been just a handful of complaints. Mistakes are made but our quality assurance is of the highest standard.”

A Scottish Courts Service spokeswoman said: “We are upgrading our recording equipment in court to digital to improve the quality of recordings. There are still some quality issues regarding tape transcriptions and these are being addressed with Mendip.”

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