Transcription (linguistics)
Encyclopedia
Transcription in the linguistic
sense is the systematic representation of language
in written form. The source can either be utterances
(speech) or preexisting text
in another writing system
, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.
Transcription should not be confused with translation
, which means representing the meaning of a source language text in a target language (e.g. translating the meaning of an English
text into Spanish
), or with transliteration
which means representing a text from one script in another (e.g. transliterating a Cyrillic
text into the Latin
script).
In the academic discipline of linguistics
, transcription is an essential part of the methodologies of (among others) Phonetics
, Conversation analysis
, Dialectology
and Sociolinguistics
. It also plays an important role for several subfields of Speech technology
. Common examples for transcriptions outside academia are the proceedings of a court hearing such as a criminal trial (by a court reporter
) or a physician
's recorded voice notes (medical transcription
). This article focuses on transcription in linguistics.
focuses on phonetic and phonological properties of spoken language. Systems for phonetic transcription thus furnish rules for mapping individual sounds or phonemes to written symbols. Systems for orthographic transcription, by contrast, consist of rules for mapping spoken words onto written forms as prescribed by the orthography
of a given language. Phonetic transcription operates with specially defined character sets, usually the International Phonetic Alphabet
.
Which type of transcription is chosen depends mostly on the research interests pursued. Since phonetic transcription strictly foregrounds the phonetic nature of language, it is most useful for phonetic or phonological analyses. Orthographic transcription, on the other hand, has a morphological and a lexical component alongside the phonetic component (which aspect is represented to which degree depends on the language and orthography in question). It is thus more convenient wherever meaning-related aspects of spoken language are investigated. Phonetic transcription is doubtlessly more systematic in a scientific sense, but it is also harder to learn, more time-consuming to carry out and less widely applicable than orthographic transcription.
What is transcribed and how it is transcribed is therefore a matter of theoretical consideration, or - as Ochs (1979: 44) states in her influential paper "Transcription as theory" - "Transcription is a selective process reflecting theoretical goals and definitions".
For example, a researcher interested in how participants in a conversation negotiate their turn taking (a typical research question in conversation analysis) may have to take into account different details concerning the timing of speakers' utterances, such as pauses, lengthening of syllables or the exact extension of simultaneous speech in a speaker overlap. He or she will consequently use a transcription system which has well-motivated rules for representing these phenomena. A dialectologist interested in a certain syntactic pattern of a regional language variant, by contrast, will have little need for this type of timing information. His or her transcription system may therefore choose not to represent such phenomena at all, or at least to treat them in less detail.
or, especially in speech technology, on its derivative SAMPA.
Examples for orthographic transcription systems (all from the field of conversation analysis or related fields) are:
CA (Conversation Analysis): Arguably the first system of its kind, originally sketched in (Sacks et al. 1978), later adapted for the use in computer readable corpora as CA-CHAT by (MacWhinney 2000)
DT (Discourse Transcription): A system described in (DuBois et al. 1992), used for transcription of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE), later developed further into DT2
GAT (Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem - Conversation Analytic transcription system): A system described in (Selting et al. 1998), later developed further into GAT2 (Selting et al. 2009), widely used in German speaking countries for prosodically
oriented conversation analysis and interactional linguistics
HIAT (Halbinterpretative Arbeitstranskriptionen - Semiinterpretative Working Transcriptions): A system originally described in (Ehlich and Rehbein 1976) - see (Ehlich 1992) for an English reference - adapted for the use in computer readable corpora as (Rehbein et al. 2004), and widely used in functional pragmatics
.
or video files, and transcriptions are electronic documents
. Specialized computer software exists to assist the transcriber in efficiently creating a digital transcription from a digital recording. Among the most widely used transcription tools in linguistic research are:
ANVIL (Annotation of Video and Language Data): A tool specialising in transcription of multimodal interaction
, see ANVIL-Website
CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis): A tool mainly used for the transcription of child language acquisition data as in the CHILDES
database, see CLAN page of the CHILDES website
ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator): A tool widely used for the transcription of sign language and the documentation of endangered languages
, see ELAN page on the Language Archiving Technology portal
EXMARaLDA
(Extensible Markup Language for Discourse Annotation): A tool widely used in discourse analysis, dialectology and sociolinguistics, see EXMARaLDA website
FOLKER (FOLK Editor): A tool developed for the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK) and widely used in conversation analysis, see FOLKER page at the website of the Institute for German Language
Praat
: A tool widely used in phonetic, see PRAAT website
Transcriber
: A tool originally developed for the transcription of speech, see Transcriber website at SourceForge
Other transcription software
is developed for commercial sale.
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
sense is the systematic representation of language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
in written form. The source can either be utterances
Spoken language
Spoken language is a form of human communication in which words derived from a large vocabulary together with a diverse variety of names are uttered through or with the mouth. All words are made up from a limited set of vowels and consonants. The spoken words they make are stringed into...
(speech) or preexisting text
Written language
A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages....
in another writing system
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.
Transcription should not be confused with translation
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
, which means representing the meaning of a source language text in a target language (e.g. translating the meaning of an English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
text into Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
), or with transliteration
Transliteration
Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
which means representing a text from one script in another (e.g. transliterating a Cyrillic
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
text into the Latin
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
script).
In the academic discipline of linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, transcription is an essential part of the methodologies of (among others) Phonetics
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
, Conversation analysis
Conversation analysis
Conversation analysis is the study of talk in interaction . CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether institutional or in casual conversation.Inspired by ethnomethodology Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated as CA) is the...
, Dialectology
Dialectology
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features...
and Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...
. It also plays an important role for several subfields of Speech technology
Speech technology
Speech technology relates to the technologies designed to duplicate and respond to the human voice. They have many uses, including to aid the voice-disabled, the hearing-disabled, the blind, and to communicate with computers without a keyboard, to market goods or services by telephone and to...
. Common examples for transcriptions outside academia are the proceedings of a court hearing such as a criminal trial (by a court reporter
Court reporter
A court reporter, stenotype reporter, voice writing reporter, or transcriber is a person whose occupation is to transcribe spoken or recorded speech into written form, using machine shorthand or voice writing equipment to produce official transcripts of court hearings, depositions and other...
) or a physician
Physician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...
's recorded voice notes (medical transcription
Medical transcription
Medical transcription, also known as MT, is an allied health profession, which deals in the process of transcription, or converting voice-recorded reports as dictated by physicians and/or other healthcare professionals, into text format.-History:...
). This article focuses on transcription in linguistics.
Phonetic vs. orthographic transcription
Broadly speaking, there are two possible approaches to linguistic transcription. Phonetic transcriptionPhonetic transcription
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds . The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, e.g., the International Phonetic Alphabet....
focuses on phonetic and phonological properties of spoken language. Systems for phonetic transcription thus furnish rules for mapping individual sounds or phonemes to written symbols. Systems for orthographic transcription, by contrast, consist of rules for mapping spoken words onto written forms as prescribed by the orthography
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
of a given language. Phonetic transcription operates with specially defined character sets, usually the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
.
Which type of transcription is chosen depends mostly on the research interests pursued. Since phonetic transcription strictly foregrounds the phonetic nature of language, it is most useful for phonetic or phonological analyses. Orthographic transcription, on the other hand, has a morphological and a lexical component alongside the phonetic component (which aspect is represented to which degree depends on the language and orthography in question). It is thus more convenient wherever meaning-related aspects of spoken language are investigated. Phonetic transcription is doubtlessly more systematic in a scientific sense, but it is also harder to learn, more time-consuming to carry out and less widely applicable than orthographic transcription.
Transcription as theory
Mapping spoken language onto written symbols is not as straightforward a process as may seem at first glance. Written language is an idealisation, made up of a limited set of clearly distinct and discrete symbols. Spoken language, on the other hand, is a continuous (as opposed to discrete) phenomenon, made up of a potentially unlimited number of components. There is no predetermined system for distinguishing and classifying these components and, consequently, no preset way of mapping these components onto written symbols.What is transcribed and how it is transcribed is therefore a matter of theoretical consideration, or - as Ochs (1979: 44) states in her influential paper "Transcription as theory" - "Transcription is a selective process reflecting theoretical goals and definitions".
For example, a researcher interested in how participants in a conversation negotiate their turn taking (a typical research question in conversation analysis) may have to take into account different details concerning the timing of speakers' utterances, such as pauses, lengthening of syllables or the exact extension of simultaneous speech in a speaker overlap. He or she will consequently use a transcription system which has well-motivated rules for representing these phenomena. A dialectologist interested in a certain syntactic pattern of a regional language variant, by contrast, will have little need for this type of timing information. His or her transcription system may therefore choose not to represent such phenomena at all, or at least to treat them in less detail.
Transcription systems
Transcription systems are sets of rules which define how spoken language is to represented in written symbols. Most phonetic transcription systems are based on the International Phonetic AlphabetInternational Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
or, especially in speech technology, on its derivative SAMPA.
Examples for orthographic transcription systems (all from the field of conversation analysis or related fields) are:
CA (Conversation Analysis): Arguably the first system of its kind, originally sketched in (Sacks et al. 1978), later adapted for the use in computer readable corpora as CA-CHAT by (MacWhinney 2000)
DT (Discourse Transcription): A system described in (DuBois et al. 1992), used for transcription of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE), later developed further into DT2
GAT (Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem - Conversation Analytic transcription system): A system described in (Selting et al. 1998), later developed further into GAT2 (Selting et al. 2009), widely used in German speaking countries for prosodically
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
oriented conversation analysis and interactional linguistics
HIAT (Halbinterpretative Arbeitstranskriptionen - Semiinterpretative Working Transcriptions): A system originally described in (Ehlich and Rehbein 1976) - see (Ehlich 1992) for an English reference - adapted for the use in computer readable corpora as (Rehbein et al. 2004), and widely used in functional pragmatics
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
.
Transcription software
Transcription was originally a process carried out manually, i.e. with pencil and paper, using an analogue sound recording stored on, e.g., a Compact Cassette. Nowadays, most transcription is done on computers. Recordings are usually digital audioAudio file format
An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. This data can be stored uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size. It can be a raw bitstream, but it is usually a container format or an audio data format with defined storage layer.-Types of...
or video files, and transcriptions are electronic documents
Electronic document
An electronic document is any electronic media content that are intended to be used in either an electronic form or as printed output....
. Specialized computer software exists to assist the transcriber in efficiently creating a digital transcription from a digital recording. Among the most widely used transcription tools in linguistic research are:
ANVIL (Annotation of Video and Language Data): A tool specialising in transcription of multimodal interaction
Multimodal interaction
Multimodal interaction provides the user with multiple modes of interfacing with a system. A multimodal interface provides several distinct tools for input and output of data.- Multimodal input :...
, see ANVIL-Website
CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis): A tool mainly used for the transcription of child language acquisition data as in the CHILDES
Childes
Childes may refer to:*Childe's Tomb , Dartmoor, England*CHILDES, or Child Language Data Exchange System, a database of child language...
database, see CLAN page of the CHILDES website
ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator): A tool widely used for the transcription of sign language and the documentation of endangered languages
Endangered language
An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....
, see ELAN page on the Language Archiving Technology portal
EXMARaLDA
EXMARaLDA
EXMARaLDA is a set of free software tools for creating, manageing and analyzing spoken language corpora. It consists of a transcription tool , a tool for administering corpus meta data and a tool for doing queries on spoken language corpora...
(Extensible Markup Language for Discourse Annotation): A tool widely used in discourse analysis, dialectology and sociolinguistics, see EXMARaLDA website
FOLKER (FOLK Editor): A tool developed for the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK) and widely used in conversation analysis, see FOLKER page at the website of the Institute for German Language
Praat
Praat
Praat is a free scientific software program for the analysis of speech in phonetics. It has been designed and continuously developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink of the University of Amsterdam. It can run on a wide range of operating systems, including various Unix versions, Mac and Microsoft...
: A tool widely used in phonetic, see PRAAT website
Transcriber
Transcriber
Transcriber is a tool for the transcription and annotation of speech signals for linguistic research. It supports multiple hierarchical layers of segmentation, named entity annotation, speaker lists, topic lists, and overlapping speakers. Two views of the sound pressure waveform at different...
: A tool originally developed for the transcription of speech, see Transcriber website at SourceForge
Other transcription software
Transcription (software)
Transcription software is software which assists in the conversion of human speech into a text transcript. The primary meaning of the term "transcription software" has changed over time, with the introduction of new technologies such as natural language speech recognition. References also depend on...
is developed for commercial sale.
See also
- Phonetic transcriptionPhonetic transcriptionPhonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds . The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, e.g., the International Phonetic Alphabet....
- Speech recognitionSpeech recognitionSpeech recognition converts spoken words to text. The term "voice recognition" is sometimes used to refer to recognition systems that must be trained to a particular speaker—as is the case for most desktop recognition software...
- Subtitle (captioning)Subtitle (captioning)Subtitles are textual versions of the dialog in films and television programs, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can either be a form of written translation of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added...
- Transcription (service)Transcription (service)A transcription service is a business which converts speech into a written or electronic text document. Transcription services are often provided for business, legal, or medical purposes. The most common type of transcription is from a spoken-language source into text such as a computer file...
- Transcription (software)Transcription (software)Transcription software is software which assists in the conversion of human speech into a text transcript. The primary meaning of the term "transcription software" has changed over time, with the introduction of new technologies such as natural language speech recognition. References also depend on...