Transcription practices

 

Payne's opinion regarding the detail of development of guidelines for transcription practices in the systems under comparison is quite explicit:

The TEI Guidelines have relatively little to say about practical transcription questions, while much of French (1992) deals specifically with such problem. It is therefore likely that the J.P. French conventions have most to contribute to the future development of the Guidelines in this area. (Payne, 1992:38)

We now wow enter into detail into these issues

Speaker overlap:

The representation of speaker overlaps is dealt with in detail by the TEI and by French's conventions. Conversion between both systems can be made in most cases, although Payne (1992:43) remarks on the difficulties due to the need for an external alignment map in TEI transcriptions and suggests the TEI Guidelines could be improved in this area.

Word form and punctuation:

According to Payne (1992:44) the section on this topic in the TEI Guidelines cites a number of problem areas, but makes few definitive proposals, while French (1992) is much more specific.

Variations in word form:

Both the TEI Guidelines and French's system suggest the use of a list of variants to ensure consistency in the transcription.

Semi-lexicals:

TEI accepts the possibility of dealing with semi-lexical phenomena as words, while French provides a list of acceptable words for English that could be easily converted to TEI usage.

Spelling conventions:

According to Payne, sets of spelling conventions for various languages similar to those developed by French for English could be incorporated into the TEI Guidelines.

Non-conventional spellings:

French's proposals for anglicized versions of foreign words could be incorporated into the TEI Guidelines and developed for other languages.

Punctuation:

In Payne's view, the TEI Guidelines do not contain a fully developed practice in this area (Payne, 1992:47), in contrast with French's clear guidance in using punctuation. Payne sees advantages in retaining the normal punctuation conventions with some adaptations and suggests the need for automatic procedures for converting these conventions into a TEI format.

Prosody:

Payne (1992:51ff) mentions the lack of development of guidelines for encoding prosody in the TEI scheme and discusses some inconsistencies of the statements about prosody in the TEI Guidelines. The favoured solution would be to incorporate basic prosodic information in the orthographic transcription and to use a fundamental frequency tracing aligned with the text in cases where a detailed prosodic analysis is needed.

Tone units:

Although an easy conversion can be made between French's boundary markers and TEI tags delimiting tone units, Payne (1992) notes the difficulties of transcribing melodic contours with TEI conventions.

Tonic syllables:

TEI Guidelines do not provide an indication of tonic syllables as straightforwardly as in French's system. As Payne (1992:55) points out if the tonic syllable is going to be marked, it should be marked in the orthographic transcription, and the TEI Guidelines should be extended to provide a way of doing this in a straightforward manner.

Tones:

Payne (1992:56) suggests the extension of TEI Guidelines to allow distinguishing tones as in French's conventions; such an extension could be based in different specifications for the tag <syllable>.

Prominent non-tonic syllables:

Prominent non-tonic syllables are marked in French's system, but no provision for such feature is found in the TEI Guidelines.

Speech management:

TEI has no specific guidelines for the transcription of disfluency phenomena, recommending transcription using IPA or other systems of phonemic transcription. On the other hand, French's conventions, adopted by NERC, are much more specific and deal with different phenomena not covered by TEI, such as guessed or unintelligible fragments.