ISSUES OF TRANSCRIPTION
CA, who place a great emphasis on the use of naturally occurring data, view transcripts as 'representation' of the data, while the tape itself is viewed as the 'reproduction' of a social event. The transcription of the data is considered part of the analysis itself. There is much that we hear in the stream of speech in addition to the sounds by which we recognise the individual words. Punctuation marks such as capital letters, full stops, question marks, commas, were introduced to go some way to represent the pauses, rhythms and tunes that are such a feature of the way people talk.
One of the difficulties encountered in trying to organise speech through the use of punctuation is that it is not always obvious that we are dealing with sentences. Even when it is fairly obvious that we are dealing with a sentence-l 151i84b ike unit a further difficulty is to decide how it is being used: to ask a question, make a statement or give an order.
There are also many, subtle ways in which speakers can use their voices in order to say things in different ways. We can refer to an individual's ability to use their voices in different ways as the individual's vocal repertoire. There are many aspects of vocal repertoire that the punctuation conventions for written texts cannot capture. Novelists overcome the problem of representing the vocal
repertoires used by the characters by the use of a wide range of verbs and descriptions of 'saying'.
Examples of words of saying: cried, murmured, whispered, gasped, insisted, shouted, etc.
Examples of descriptions of how things were said: hesitantly, brusquely, slowly, quickly, with a smile, with a laugh, emphatically, etc.
The focus may be primarily on the physical characteristics of what is heard, or on other matters such as the social, psychological or conversational context of what is said.
E.g. (from Langford, 1994:38):
'I love you', whispered the doctor (focus on physical).
'I love you', pouted the doctor (focus on physical = rounding and protrusion of lips - and social/psychological - are led to assume that the doctor is female and possibly that the relationship of speaker to audience is of a sexual kind)).
'I love you', replied the doctor (focus on conversational context - we are led to believe that what the doctor says occurs at a particular sequential position in the conversation, i.e. following something another speaker has said.)
These descriptive terms for reported speech have more to do with interpretation of what is said than with the physical details of how it is said. So, for the purpose of detailed examination of how people actually talk to one another we need to adapt and extend the standard orthography.
Researchers working within CA tradition have created a well-defined system of transcription of spoken data. They usually include such detailed features of talk as the precise beginning and ending of turns, the duration of pauses, audible sounds such as breathiness, and stress in individual words. On the other hand, it is also agreed among researchers that transcription is a selective process reflecting the researcher's interpretation of what he/he hears on the tape, and reflecting theoretical goals and definitions. It is most unlikely that any two transcribers will pick on precisely the same features to represent.
I. FEATURES OF TALK REPRESENTED IN TRANSCRIPTIONS
A transcription will be effective to the extent it can clearly and comprehensibly represent those characteristics of spoken verbal interaction:
Produced spontaneously
Produced with the intention that there be some response
Designed to show for each utterance that it is either a response, is meant to elicit a response, or both
Designed to take account, on a moment-by-moment basis, of the roles the participants, the purposes and the situation in which talk occurs.
The features of talk represented in transcripts are mostly involved with particular analytical issues. However, in order to capture the participants' behaviour, you have to write down such details as: unfinished words, non-verbal vocalisations, silences (which you feel are attributable to the current speaker or to other participants). They may fall into two categories:
Turn-taking features
Turn: a turn is the utterance(s) by which a speaker holds the floor and a new turn starts when there is a speaker change. An utterance may be made of one or more words, including non-linguistic vocalisations, such as laughter and back-channeling.
The turn at talk is the main unit of analysis of the interaction. However, since the page lines are strictly limited in length, whereas turns are not, whenever the turn takes longer than a line, you could simply continue the transcription of the turn onto the next line.
However, you may come across cases in which there are long stretches of uninterrupted talk (for example in story-telling). Then the issue of marking line boundaries may occur. For reasons of readability and relevance to the analysis, in the long streteches of uninterrupted talk, you can use one line for:
A complete informational phrase, that is, a syntactical phrase, showing a grammatical clause completion (where there are short clauses you may choose to allow several clauses per line)
A phrase which is bounded by rising intonation or falling intonation.
E.g. (Coposescu, 2003)
100 RC1:I have to resist as many years as possible (.)
er because my work is very important and (.) maybe (.)
so after the Romanian Orphanage Trust left the country,
er the only problem we had (.)
the training was exceptional (.)
everything was great
but we still have state institutions (.) care institutions
and the problem was to try to get rid of those institutions
or to offer some alternatives to state institutions.
so the German government with the Romanian government in 1995 (.)
er offered to pay a house, (.)
a family house with ten places the Transient House
the purpose [.] is to take children from maternities (.)
small babies, it's for children from zero to three (.)
er in order to put them into state institutions,
in that family house to prepare for reintegration,
or for national adoption
so, I will present the social requirements of that house .
Back-channeling - Non-word vocalisations are transcribed, as appropriate, with er, erm, mm. These are important to transcribe because they can be interpreted as acknowledgement tokens, or 'continuers', demonstrating that the producer of such tokens recognises that an extended turn at talk is underway and that the current speaker's turn is not yet complete.
Laughter: hehehe, or simply (laughter)
Pause: these are defined as intervals between turns, which may show: 1) clause completion) or 2) signals the point where the next speaker can pick up the floor. Pauses refer to the timing of the participants' talk relative to each other. The following speaker's talk may be latched on to the prior speaker's with no gap at all. Sometimes the speakers talk at the same time and produce overlapping talk. There are inferences that can be made on the timing of the talk, such as being supportive, pushy, downright interruptive, etc.
Prosodic features
Prosody refers to rhythm and intonation. You may include such prosodic features as:
Loudness - segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that are particularly loud relative to the surrounding talk
Stress - segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that have particularly strong stress relative to surrounding talk
Intonation contour - clause final intonation, clause final rising intonation
Below are listed symbols and their significance that you could use when transcribing a piece of conversation:
Symbol Significance
Arabic numerals line numbers
clause final falling intonation
clause final rising intonation
slight rise
short hesitation within a turn (less than 2 seconds)
inter-turn pause longer than 1 second, the number indicating the seconds
= latched utterances, with no discernible gap between the prior speaker's and the next speaker's talk
the onset of overlapping talk
CAPS Segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that are particularly loud relative to the surrounding talk;
Underlined item segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that have particularly strong stress relative to surrounding talk
lengthened syllables or vowels
(words within transcriber's guesses
parentheses)
[words in square non-verbal information and/or unclear passages
brackets]
unidentified speaker
italics word in Romanian
Other transcription conventions:
Non-transcribable segments of talk. These are indicated as [unclear]
Uncertain transcription. Words within parentheses indicate the guess.
Non-verbal information. I have included in square brackets non-verbal information, such as the information in the dinner-party conversation [J comes in], because it is relevant for the change of topic by J.
Here is a sample of a transcript taken from the dinner-party conversation to illustrate the level of transcription detail:
J: tried er er a cookery book about vegetarian Romanian FOOD
(*): ohh
[laughter]
Ch: it's just loads isn't it the vegetables that they make.
J: oh lovely vegetables. yes. I I've I mean. I've looked for a Romanian cookery book when er before I came here and there only one about. er it was sort of 99 percent meat .
[laughter]
(*) [unclear] so
M: pork pork and pork.
[laughter]
L: what was the one percent. what was this er the last the one percent.
J: oh polenta.
[laughter]
and even the polenta had had stock meat stock again [laughing]
Ch: fasole:: fasole a::nd
(*): aubergine
Ch: beans and the egg plant aubergines as well
(*) mhm
When transcribing recorded conversations, you will have to decide how detailed your transcription should be, depending on the kind of analysis you are going to do. You could also create your own system of transcription, the most important thing being consistency in your transcription.
II. SUMMARY
Features of talk represented in transcriptions
The features of talk represented in transcripts are mostly involved with particular analytical issues. However, in order to capture the participants' behaviour, you have to write down such details as: unfinished words, non-verbal vocalisations, silences (which you feel are attributable to the current speaker or to other participants). They may fall into two categories:
Turn-taking features
Turn: a turn is the utterance(s) by which a speaker holds the floor and a new turn starts when there is a speaker change. An utterance may be made of one or more words, including non-linguistic vocalisations, such as laughter and back-channeling.
Back-channeling - Non-word vocalisations are transcribed, as appropriate, with er, erm, mm. These are important to transcribe because they can be interpreted as acknowledgement tokens, or 'continuers', demonstrating that the producer of such tokens recognises that an extended turn at talk is underway and that the current speaker's turn is not yet complete.
Laughter: hehehe, or simply (laughter)
Pause: these are defined as intervals between turns, which may show: 1) clause completion) or 2) signals the point where the next speaker can pick up the floor. Pauses refer to the timing of the participants' talk relative to each other.
Sometimes the speakers talk at the same time and produce overlapping talk. There are inferences that can be made on the timing of the talk, such as being supportive, pushy, downright interruptive, etc.
Prosodic features
Prosody refers to rhythm and intonation. You may include such prosodic features as:
Loudness - segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that are particularly loud relative to the surrounding talk
Stress - segments, syllables, words or sequences of words that have particularly strong stress relative to surrounding talk
Intonation contour - clause final intonation, clause final rising intonation
III. TASKS
1 The following is an extract from Nora Ephron's novel Heartburn. The extract is a part of a telephone conversation which Betty has made to Rachel in which Rachel takes the opportunity to start a rumour about Thelma whom she suspects her own husband of having an affair with. Betty is unaware of Rachel's suspicion.
The author mostly uses the verb 'say' in reporting speech. Substitute alternative verbs of saying or descriptions of ways of saying, to indicate how you think the things might have been said (from Langford,1994:39-40).
'Anyway, it doesn't matter', said Betty, 'because I found out who Thelma Rice is having an affair with'.
'Who?', I said.
'You're not going to like it', said Betty.
'Who is it?', I said.
'Arthur', said Betty.
'Arthur Siegal?' I said.
'Yes', said Betty. 'They were having drinks in the Washington Hilton yesterday afternoon. Nobody has drinks in the Washington Hilton unless something secret's going on.'
2. Record any piece of informal conversation (from any source you can afford) and transcribe a short excerpt. Create your own system of transcription conventions. Design the transcription system in such a way as to produce transcripts that are accurate at the relevant level of detail, but accessible to the reader too.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Coposescu, L., 2003, The construction of meaning in the
Interaction between native speakers
of English and Romanians, Editura Universitatii Transilvania din
Ochs, E., 1979, Transcription as Theory, in A. Jaworski
and N.Coupland (eds.), The Discourse Reader,
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