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Ulrike Mosel
the idiomatic translation next to the transcription and giving a literal trans-
lation in the footnotes wherever we thought it necessary for a better under-
standing of linguistic structures.
It might be difficult to find people in the community who feel confident
to do translations on their own, but if you do, employ them even if their
knowledge of the target language is not perfect and their translations cannot
be directly used for the documentation. Any differences between their
translation and yours can provide useful indications that some of your inter-
pretations are misguided and need to be revised. Before they start, explain
to them that this will be only a raw translation and that they need not be
worried about making mistakes at this stage. If they do not know the trans-
lation equivalent of an expression, or if there is none in the target language,
they can use the original expression and explain its meaning in brackets or
in a footnote. To clearly show how the translation relates to the original, it
is advisable to number the utterances in the transcription and ask the trans-
lator to do the translation utterance by utterance using the same numbers in
his or her translation. Otherwise, there is the danger that he or she might be
inclined to retell the recording, rather than translate it.
6.4. Editorial work
Since transcriptions are, as mentioned above, not a pleasant read, the local
fieldworkers may want to edit them. In order to prevent that they model
their editorial work in syntax, style, phraseology, or discourse structure on
the written dominant language (see Foley 2003), the following guidelines
may be helpful:
–
as an editor, always respect the speaker’s way of saying things;
–
never change words and phrases for stylistic reasons, but only where the
speaker makes an obvious mistake;
–
do not change the sentence structure; do not, for instance, replace coor-
dinate clauses by subordinate clauses;
–
do not change direct speech into indirect speech or vice versa;
–
add information only where absolutely necessary for understanding; for
instance, when the speaker refers to things no longer known to the
younger generation;
–
do not shorten the text.
Chapter 3 – Fieldwork and community language work
81
7. Work flow and time management
Efficient work presupposes a well organized work flow and good time man-
agement. It is impossible to plan everything in advance, because one does
not know the talents and interests of the local language workers, and they
themselves do not know them before having had some practice in linguistic
work. Therefore, it is advisable to start with only two or maximally three
people and allocate some time for the development of a work routine. Later
on, more people can join the team.
The researcher and local language workers should always have a clear
idea of what kind of work needs to be done and when it needs to be done
and, therefore, jointly organize their work along the following lines:
–
identify what kind of activities are required to produce a piece of docu-
mentation work;
–
discuss who will do what;
–
make a work plan by putting the various activities into a certain order
and allocating a certain time for each;
–
try to stick to the work plan; finish one thing before you do the next;
–
evaluate the work plan and revise it.
As the organizer of the documentation, you will only be successful if you
divide your project into small and easily manageable subprojects, and al-
ways try to finish one before you start with the next. On no account should
the transcription, the translation, and the description of the circumstances of
the recordings be postponed until later, because the recordings might be so
context-bound that they are hardly understandable once the details of this
context have been forgotten. Duranti (1994: 31) reports about his experi-
ences in Samoa: “I found that even people in the same village would mis-
interpret utterances when removed from their immediate context and the
fact of speaking the same language or living in the same community was no
guarantee of the accuracy of transcription and interpretation.”
Furthermore, with each transcription and translation you will discover
exciting features of the language, and you and the other team members will
become more and more motivated when you see how the drafts are com-
pleted one after the other. There are areas and circumstances where you can-
not use a computer and have to revert to handwriting or a manual typewriter.
If, however, the field situation allows you to use a computer, you should
also have a printer in order to give your co-workers printouts to read.
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Ulrike Mosel
One problem with time management is that local language workers may
hesitate to conclude a piece of work. There is always something that can be
improved so that they may insist on continuous revisions. They also might
be afraid of criticism from other members of the community. And criticism
will definitely come. Here strict deadlines help. When I worked with a team
of Samoan teachers on the Samoan monolingual dictionary for school chil-
dren (Mosel and So’o 2000), I very much appreciated the strict deadline set
by the funding agency, the Australian Agency for International Develop-
ment. Meeting the deadline obliged us to make compromises and refrain
from perfectionism. One of the mistakes we discovered soon after publica-
tion was the definition of koale ‘coal’ that translates into English as ‘coal is
a black or dark-brown mineral found in the ground. It is used for making
fire as well as for the production of the drink Coca-Cola’. (Mosel and So’o
2000: 150) But having a dictionary containing such a mistake is certainly
better than a half-finished manuscript that will never be published.
When I was working on the Teop language in Bougainville in 2004, which
was my fourth fieldtrip to the area, we established the following work flow;
note that all work had to be done in handwriting:
–
recordings on MDs (Enoch, Shalom, Ulrike);
–
writing down the metadata of the recordings and copying the MDs on
cassette tapes (Ulrike);
–
transcribing the cassette tapes (Enoch, Joyce, Shalom);
–
checking the transcriptions and rewriting them in legible handwriting
using a consistent practical orthography (Ulrike);
–
discussing the transcription with the transcribers (Ulrike with Enoch,
Joyce, and Shalom);
–
going through the revised transcription while again listening to the tape,
trying to understand the recording, noting down new words with the ex-
planations of a native speaker (Ulrike with Siimaa and Joyce);
–
translating the transcriptions into English (Ulrike with Siimaa and
Joyce);
–
giving the original transcriptions back to the transcribers Joyce and
Enoch for editing;
–
checking the editing, discussing and revising them (Ulrike with Enoch
and Joyce respectively, often in the presence of Siimaa);
–
giving the revised edited versions to the translator (Naphtaly);
–
checking and discussing the translation (Ulrike with Naphtaly, often in
the presence of Siimaa).
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