Basic Principles of Transcription

Basic Principles of Transcription

To begin with a citation such as this is not quite fair! Anyone who does not recognize it as the end of T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1958: 186), followed immediately by ‘curtain’ in the published text, is considerably disadvantaged. Let us assume for the present purposes that it is also a record of something other than just the last page of a book – that it is also a transcript of a performance from the first production at the Edinburgh Festival, 22–7 August 1949, and has been produced from a filmed performance.

This is admittedly a fiction. Originally, Eliot did not transcribe this play, he composed it. Composition is the basic determination of the words, written sequences and structures considered necessary for this work to be The Cocktail Party; but one does not transcribe one's thoughts into writing, except in some figurative sense. Without a performance, adhering to the prescribed words of a composition, there can be no transcript thereof; and there are as many different transcripts possible as there are different performances of the same composition. And as we shall see, there are as many possible transcripts of the same performance just as there are various purposes for transcribing.

What we will be discussing in the following is largely a matter of everybody's purposes in doing and saying certain things and in the transcribing thereof. Thus arises our very first question regarding transcription: sampling. To be concrete about it, why would anyone want to [Page 94]transcribe just this fragment of dialogue? Without knowing about British playwrights in mid-century, about Eliot himself, about the rest of the play, about the styles of Ursula Jeans (Lavinia) and Robert Flemyng (Edward), about the setting of the Edinburgh Festival, without having been there, and without having seen the film produced from the performance, one is really at a loss as to why this fragment has been sampled.

Well, we sampled it, and our purpose in doing so is to have it stand here for the duration of this piece to be queried about the various purposes we spoke of above and about how to accomplish them in the processes of transcribing.

But to return to this first question of sampling, it is hard to imagine some other legitimate purpose in sampling just this much of The Cocktail Party unless perhaps at the end of a composition that would give it a context and provide a purpose for sampling precisely this fragment.

In point of fact, much of what we deal with in transcribing spoken discourse is in one sense or another fragmentary. It is, in fact, literally the case that the only way to know what really went on in a conversation is to have been there. And even then, the appreciations and corresponding reports of participants A, B and C, and of the neutral bystander-observer, will be divergent. This divergence is not just noise; it is part and parcel of the richness and beauty of intentions and understandings in human discourse: they do indeed transcend any record that can be made of them.

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