Oral History :: Transcription

Oral History Interview & Importance – Part 28

Transcription

Hamid Qazvini
Translated by Natalie Haghverdian

2017-11-07

Once the interview is conducted then it has to be transcribed. The final goal of transcription is not to produce a final content but to write down the words of the narrator in the form of raw material to facilitate archiving and exploit. The following are to be considered in this effort:

The transcriber shall be educated enough. In some cases the transcribed content is filled with dictation errors which interrupts the interview process and final production.
The transcriber shall be well versed in computers and relevant software.
The transcriber shall be equipped with patience.
The transcriber shall be trustworthy. The transcriber is not only tasked to do the job but to protect the content against early release or access.
During transcription, the whole content shall be written accordingly and selective omissions (word or phrase) shall be avoided.
The narrator’s prose shall be protected and literary words shall not be substituted. In case of necessity diacritics might be applied. (Any modifications or changes in the content shall be applied in the final production phase by the interviewer or the content producer.)
The font unity shall be observed which is selected by the project implementer.
In order to facilitate reading, punctuation shall be applied; such as full stop (.), question mark (?), exclamation mark (1), comma (,), semicolon (;), colon (:), quotation marks (“”).
The prose of poetry shall be preserved.
Unfinished sentences shall be marked with ellipsis and the next portion shall start as new.
The narrator’s emotions such as laughter, cry, scream, silence, etc. shall be stated in parenthesis.
If a sentence or a phrase is ambiguous then “Ambiguous” shall be stated by the end.
There is no need to write repetitive sentences or terms of faulty articulation which have been corrected.
In order to segregate the sentences of different individuals each sentence shall start in a new line even if it is one word.
Name of each speaker shall be stated at the beginning of the sentence. The name of the interviewer shall be stated in front of his sentence and the name of the narrator at the beginning of the response.
Omission of “slogans”[1] which have no role in progression of the interview is permissible.
The content identification information such as: name of the narrator, name of the interviewer, transcriber, interview date, time and number of pages shall be included.
When the narrator or the interviewer include issues and content to help transparency and better understanding or elaborate on a subject the said sentences shall be included in (()). (This mark shall not be mistaken with parenthesis or guillemets.)
Names of individuals, locations, books, films, publications, etc. shall be placed in guillemets.
Avoid repetitions either in letters or words.
Avoid complicated terminology
Once the transcription is complete, review and control the content for compatibility with the tone and also the quality of word conducted by the transcriber.