Once you’ve completed your interview, you’ll almost certainly have gained a new perspective about language and the way people use words. But, if you’re willing to spend a little more time in analysing your interview, you’ll be able to spot far more than you’ll have noticed whilst you were focusing on running the interview.

You could simply listen a few times to your recording and make notes, but it can be more revealing to work from a transcript. Making a transcript, however, can take a very long time – a rule of thumb is about 7 -10 hours transcription time for a 1 hour recording - so it is highly unlikely that you’ll want to try and transcribe everything you’ve recorded! It is quite normal for a researcher to focus on transcribing just a few particularly interesting sections, and how much detail you transcribe in is always going to depend on what you’re interested in researching.

Over the years linguists have developed a special alphabet, the International Phonetic Alphabet, which enables them to represent the precise pronunciation of any word in any language. If you are interested to find out more about this, then our page of weblinks includes some useful websites on this subject. The Voices project, however, is primarily about people’s choice of words rather than their accents, and so a simple transcription in conventional spelling, along the lines of a play script, will probably be the best approach for your purposes. Here is an example of what a short transcription in standard play format might look like:

JODIE: You know ‘chavvies’, would you say that for, erm, is that like kind of a backslang word...

KAREN: It’s backslang word for children – yeah.

JODIE: ...or is that something that you’ve picked up?

LYNNIE: I think that might be...

KAREN: Your chavvies...

LYNNIE: No, I don’t think it is.. it is...

KAREN: ... is your children.

WOMAN: Nope. I don’t think it’s a back, backslang... You’re getting...

PETER: I don’t know what you’re on about.

LYNNIE: No I wouldn’t … but you’re getting backslang mixed up...

????: Shhh

LYNNIE: ...with what’s sort sort of common dialect for Scousers, then, because... or old Scouse might have said ‘chavvies’... because backslang is where, say, ‘shabbite’ is shite and ‘beatch’ is bitch. So that it’s words that are put back to front or, whichever way, something’s added on, that’s backslang, but what I think you’re getting, I think, mixed up with is old Liverpool sayings.

PETER?: Beatch.

[Laughter]

LYNNIE: ‘Beatch’ that’s one isn’t it.
So like, eh, what else, what other things do they say, like? The nippers means the kids doesn’t it? We would say kids, we wouldn’t say children.

BOY: Sprogs.

WOMAN: Sprogs, yes.

MAN: Binlids.

JODIE: What’s that?

MAN: Binlids.

JODIE: Where’s that come from?

MAN: They’re babies. But I dunno why they call them binlids

KAREN: Little tramps.

WOMAN: No because it rhymes with kids.

MAN: Ah Yeah.

WOMAN: Kids. Kids is a baby goat isn’t it? That’s a kid so I take it, it just means kids. So binlids are little kids, as opposed to teenage kids.

KAREN: [Aside to baby] Are you going out the room?

LYNNIE: Bin lids are little ones.

If you want to try something a little more sophisticated, then you might like to have a go at a transcription format which, also makes clear the nature of the interactions between the participants - for example whether two or three people are talking at once, whether one person dominates the conversation, or whether it takes someone several goes to get their point across. If you have access to a video recording, it’s also possible to leave space in an extra column to record any non-verbal features of the interaction, for example whether somebody is looking in a particular direction, gesturing or pulling a face. Here is the same extract as before but presented in an alternative format which uses a separate column for each of the speakers:

Jodie: You know ‘chavvies’, would you say that for, erm, is that like kind of a backslang word… or is that something that you’ve picked up?

You will see from this that Lynnie tries several times to make her point before everyone finally stops to listen to her! This might not have been apparent on a first listening. Similarly, you might find that the person who first mentions a particular word is not actually the person you first thought you heard it from.

An additional feature of a more ‘advanced’ kind of transcript like the one illustrated above is that it doesn’t attempt to ‘tidy up’ what people say. One of the big differences between speech and writing is that people don’t tend to speak in fully formed sentences. Normally we don’t notice just how many false starts there often are, or how repetitive we can be, but when you are transcribing you’ll quickly notice this. As a result you might find it hard to decide how best to punctuate your transcript – if in doubt, don't worry, you don’t actually need to punctuate at all! However, if it helps you to make sense of your transcript as you read it back, you might find it useful to think of a comma as indicating a very short pause, a full stop as indicating a rather longer pause, an exclamation mark for an increase in volume and a question mark for a rising tone at the end of an utterance. After all, this is more or less what these four signs are meant to indicate in writing anyway! Some transcribers invent additional symbols, depending on what particular features they are interested in examining.