Representing Discourse: The Rhetoric of Transcription

Abstract Transcription is the general procedure used in studies of discourse to re-present speech as written text. Different notation systems have been proposed, and emphasis is often placed on achieving a high level of precision and accuracy of transcripts. In this article, transcription is treated as an instance of the general problem of the representation of reality that appears in diverse fields, such as photography and the biological and natural sciences. Three studies are examined where alternative transcripts of the same stretch of speech were presented and analyzed. This comparison shows how different transcript formats both reflect and reflexively support theoretical aims and interpretations and serve rhetorical functions. The essential indeterminancy and ambiguity of the relationship be-tween language and meaning, which has emerged from the widespread critique of naive realism, both sets the problem and provides the context within which we can understand transcription as an interpretive practice. (Sociolinguistics)