Language documentation tools and methods: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 04:38, 20 July 2018

Revision as of 04:39, 20 July 2018

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For many linguists the end-result of making recordings is language analysis, often grammatical investigation of a language's phonological or syntactic properties via one of the software tools listed below. This requires transcription of the audio, generally in collaboration with native speakers of the language in question. For general transcription, media files can be played back on a computer (or other device capable of playback) and paused for transcription in a text editor. Other (cross-platform) tools to assist this process include [https://www.audacityteam.org/ Audacity] and [[sourceforge:projects/trans/files/transcriber/1.5.1/|Transcriber]], while a program like [https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/ ELAN] (described further below) can also perform this function.

Programs like [https://software.sil.org/toolbox/ Toolbox] or [https://software.sil.org/fieldworks/ FLEx] are often preferred by linguists who want to be able to [[Interlinear gloss|interlinearize]] their texts, as these programs build a dictionary of forms and parsing rules to help speed up analysis. Unfortunately, media files are generally not linked by these programs (as theyopposed areto ELAN, in ELANwhich linked files are preferred), making it difficult to view or listen back to recordings to check transcriptions. There is [https://github.com/lingdoc/trs2txt currently a workaround] for Toolbox that allows timecodes to reference an audio file and enable playback (of a complete text or a referenced sentence) from within Toolbox - in this workflow, time-alignment of text is performed in Transcriber, and then the relevant timecodes and text are converted into a format that Toolbox can read.

== Hardware ==