Listening, typing, listening, typing, listening again and correcting what she typed before. Aleks is entirely in her element. After the two successful fieldtrips, each of the three researchers spent in Tunisia, the team proudly counts 82 recordings of people’s reading sample texts in their local dialect!
As part of the VICAV project, the collection and transcription of sample text recordings is embedded in a transnational comparison of Arab dialect varieties. At the same time, the possibility to compare sample text readings of so many different reference points within just one country is unique within this project!
Working on the spot, Ilona, Aleksandra and Franziska sometimes had to remind their interviewees to keep on talking their dialect – and not just reading the given text as it is written. Working on its transcription, nevertheless, means going much more into details and focusing on the linguistic nuances.
Aleksandra reports:
“I spent a big part of the month of December with the transcription of sample texts recorded in the respective dialect (the template for the sample texts is provided by the VICAV project).
On the one hand, it was refreshing that transcribing one sample text took only 15-30 minutes on average, and by that the sense of achievement was experienced faster and more often than it is the case with other types of recordings, which made the motivation for this task fairly high. On the other hand, the overwhelming amount of the sample texts made the task monotonous over time. However, after finishing the transcription of the sample texts of the Beja and El Kef governorates, hearing and transcribing the sample texts from the governorate of Gafsa was a pleasant alternation for me, as these dialects are significantly different from those in Beja and El Kef.”
