Abstract
This chapter argues that transcription should be conceived of as a special case of entextualization, viz., the reification or fixation of verbal interaction, making it transportable in space and time. The chapter discusses issues of readability and naturalness of representation, especially with regard to the representation of multilingual interaction and the use of non-Latin scripts in transcription.
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live…
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Notes
- 1.
As we understand Bauman and Briggs (1990), who have been the most important promoters of the term “entextualization”, our term “retextualization” is not quite the same as, or only part of, their process of recontextualization. Baumann and Briggs are not interested in interaction research and transcription practices, but more broadly in the aesthetic uses of language and an ethnography of performance.
- 2.
The idea for this thought experiment we owe to Spencer Hazel. The same excerpt is also used by Kasper (2013) for a similar argument.
- 3.
The common terms dialect and accent in English (as used even outside of interaction and language studies) are not quite identical to Continental concepts of German Dialekt and Akzent or Danish dialekt and accent, where Akzent/accent typically apply to foreign accents, not the pronunciation of “native” lects. Wodak terms the variety that occurs in her data: Viennese vernacular, “Wiener Umgangssprache”.
- 4.
Note that the use of eye dialect is no solution; the example quoted by Preston, see above, is firmly anchored within American English spelling conventions; the same technique could only be used for multilingual interaction if one decided that everything has to be noted by the conventions of one of the languages involved.
- 5.
Although this is not clear from the excerpt, this applies also to other post-vocalic occurrences of /r/.
- 6.
It has to be noted though that in either notation there is a lot of being taken for granted since only what the transcriber (and later analyzer) considers a “rich point” (Agar 1994) is granted an annotation. Everything else is taken to be “business as usual”, but for readers not familiar to the same degree with the languages or varieties, there may still be doubts about the exact phonetic shape of the utterance.
- 7.
We are not told if “English” is a glossonym or a toponym here, i.e. “in English” or in “in England”.
- 8.
In a data session of the Lingcorp project at Roskilde University, the question came up if a particular speaker tried to sound like a Danish speaker trying to sound like a German. Again, this tentative interpretation offer was made on the basis not of a transcript but of listening to a first-order entextualization. The other participants in the data acknowledged this as a joke, but there was no way of telling on the basis of the video recording whether this was a joke about German or Danish speakers. We doubt that a more fine-grained, but purely descriptive transcript could have solved the issue.
- 9.
The same example has been used in Fabricius et al. forthcoming.
- 10.
These displays do not exist anymore in this form in 2014; now only one written representation is displayed, replacing the copula (係 and 是, resp.) with a colon. The spoken announcement is still in Cantonese and Putonghua. Special thanks to Jim Lo who did the research on this for us, and David Li who facilitated the contact.
- 11.
That it is common to use traditional forms of these characters in Hong Kong even for Putonghua, while standardized simplified forms are used on the Mainland, adds a complication we are not going to discuss here; neither that this distinction does not apply to handwritten characters (as opposed to printed ones) quite in the same way.
- 12.
We use Yale Romanization for Cantonese and pinyin in transliterating Putonghua.
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Acknowledgment
This chapter goes back to various presentations by the authors in Hong Kong (March 2010 and May 2011), Roskilde (June 2010) and Osaka (March 2012), for the latter see Haberland (2012), which has been re-used in this chapter to a certain degree, and Hazel and Mortensen (2012). In spite of some hints in Haberland and Mey (1977, p. 8) on transcription and fetishization, the ideas about transcription we present here have mainly been developed in recent years in discussions with colleagues at the CALPIU Research Center in Roskilde, especially Spencer Hazel, and in part also with members of RCLEAMS in Hong Kong. We are grateful to Sonja Barfod, Anne H. Fabricius, Mads J. Kirkebæk, Kamilla Kraft and David C. S. Li for valuable comments on earlier drafts. Remaining shortcomings are of course our responsibility alone.
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Haberland, H., Mortensen, J. (2016). Transcription as Second-Order Entextualization: The Challenge of Heteroglossia. In: Capone, A., Mey, J. (eds) Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12616-6_23
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