the term transcription is used with sometimes widely different meanings. […] In the context of scholarly editing, Vander Meulen and Tanselle (1999) offer the following definition:

… by transcription we mean the effort to report—insofar as typography allows— precisely what the textual inscription of a manuscript consists of. (p. 201)

If understood literally, this definition might seem to take transcription to denote an act (the ‘effort to report’). However, the term is just as frequently used, also by Vander Meulen and Tanselle in the article just quoted, to denote the product of that act, that is, a document. Elsewhere, the term is not infrequently used to refer to the relationship between documents—one document may be said to be a transcription of another document.