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 consider only the former to be 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.

  Phonetic vs. orthographic transcription

Broadly speaking, there are two possible approaches to linguistic transcription. Phonetic transcription 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.

  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.

  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 Alphabet 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.

  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 audio 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.

  See also

• Phonetic transcription
• Speech recognition
• Subtitle (captioning)
• Transcription (service)
• Transcription (software)
• Interlinear gloss

  External links

• Transcription in Action - website from UC Santa Barbara
• Documentation and examples for the HIAT transcription system
• Transcription - a website with resources for transcription in conversation analysis
• Turn your text into fənɛ́tɪks (IPA / American)

  References

• DuBois, John / Schuetze-Coburn, Stephan / Cumming, Susanne / Paolino, Danae (1992): Outline of Discourse Transcription. In: Edwards/Lampert (1992), 45-89.
• Ehlich, K. (1992). HIAT - a Transcription System for Discourse Data. In: Edwards, Jane / Lampert, Martin (eds.): Talking Data – Transcription and Coding in Discourse Research. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 123-148.
• Ehlich, K. & Rehbein, J. (1976) Halbinterpretative Arbeitstranskriptionen (HIAT). In: Linguistische Berichte (45), 21-41.
• Jenks, C.J. (2011) Transcribing Talk and Interaction: Issues in the Representation of Communication Data. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• MacWhinney, Brian (2000): The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Rehbein, J.; Schmidt, T.; Meyer, B.; Watzke, F. & Herkenrath, A. (2004) Handbuch für das computergestützte Transkribieren nach HIAT. In: Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit, Folge B (56). Online version
• Ochs, E. (1979) Transcription as theory. In: Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, B. B. (ed.): Developmental pragmatics, 43-72. New York: Academic Press.
• Sacks, H.; Schegloff, E. & Jefferson, G. (1978) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation. In: Schenkein, J. (ed.): Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, 7-56. New York: Academic Press.
• Selting, Margret / Auer, Peter / Barden, Birgit / Bergmann, Jörg / Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth / Günthner, Susanne / Meier, Christoph / Quasthoff, Uta / Schlobinski, Peter / Uhmann, Susanne (1998): Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem (GAT). In: Linguistische Berichte 173, 91-122.
• Selting, M., Auer, P., Barth-Weingarten, D., Bergmann, J., Bergmann, P., Birkner, K., Couper-Kuhlen, E., Deppermann, A., Gilles, P., Günthner, S., Hartung, M., Kern, F., Mertzlufft, C., Meyer, C., Morek, M., Oberzaucher, F., Peters, J., Quasthoff, U., Schütte, W., Stukenbrock, A., Uhmann, S. (2009): Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT 2). In: Gesprächsforschung (10), 353-402. Online version