How to Transcribe a Spoken Text for ICE

It was our second semester as MSc Applied Linguistics, when we were assigned to collect video/audio recordings from Internet or record our own, and then transcribe them. This project was a hell lot of difficult and some of my class fellows were so angry due to the difficulty level. The details were simple: You were assigned a topic e.g. Lectures, Speeches, TV News, Radio News; Record your specific genre or take it from Youtube.com; Listen and Transcribe it; and Tag it with appropriate tags.

Well the process is not difficult. The time which it takes to complete all this annoys people. Transcription is one of the most time consuming jobs of the world. Normally 1 minute of spoken recording can take upto 6 to 7 minutes for writing it. So you can see for 1 hour of spoken recording one will have to spend upto 7 hours of listening and typing it. This is not that simple, it is not just that you play it and start typing. You will always have to stop the recording again and again, sometimes it would be because your typing speed will not match with that of speaking speed of the speakers, other times you may not get the clear idea what the speaker is saying so you'll have to replay the audio to concentrate on it and get what the speaker is trying to say, still other times you'll have to stop and think how to write down uhmms, errrs, overlaps etc. The situation gets worst when it comes to Talk Shows, Telephonic or Live Conversations, Lectures, Question Answer Sessions. Remember the more the speakers, the more the distractions and more time consumption on transcription. We considered those people lucky ones who got Speeches, TV News, Radio News etc. Because all these genres are spoken by one person, and secondly they are usually scripted i.e. the spoken material is written in front of the speaker so s/he has to speak it out only. But in spontaneous talks like Talk Shows this is not the case. There are more speakers, there are overlappings i.e. two people start speaking at same time, there are errrrs, hmmmmmms and other unnecessary sounds which the speaker utter. But we cannot ignore these sounds. We can understand two people speaking at same time in spoken audio, but when it comes to transcription we have to devise a method to show that these particular sentences or words were uttered by both of the speakers at same time i.e. overlapping. Here we have to use Tags to show this phenomenon. Now either we can devise our own tags or we can use tags which are devised by someone else. Since as students we work for the completion of International Corpus of English i.e. ICE Pakistan Component, we have to use their devised method of Tagging. The tagging scheme is available here.

Now what should be done here? It is simple you'll have to go through all of this document. Because you are going to listen and transcribe your spoken recordings not me. So if you do not understand it, it wouldn't work. I can only provide an example by transcribing a few lines of a video from Youtube.

<$A> is by the federal government
<$B> Ok uhmm <}><->I've<=>I've jsut lit literally about half a minute Mr. Babar. Let me just ask you this question that is come uhm from Asif who is watching from Canada....

 I've just covered first 12 seconds of the above video and it took me 5 minutes to cover all the things, to WRITE DOWN what these people were performing as a routine speaking activity. The video starts with an unclear word. I had to replay it several times when I couldn't get exactly I put "is by" by my own guess and put tags around it. You can see in first line the tags , they show that the words were not intelligible. Of course I've consulted the ICE Manual (link provided above) for this tag. Even before this tag you can see the <$A> tag, which shows the first speaker. And this tag I have also got after going through the manual which says that every speaker's utterance should be started on a new line marked with speaker identity i.e. first speaker would be A, second would be B and so on. And you can see there involve two speakers in first 12 seconds and I've shown both separately with their utterances on new line with <$A>, <$B> tags. And then you may be able to see that the hostess says 'uhmm' after saying 'Ok', we cannot ignore it while transcribing. Because these hesitations and uhmms can be helpful in Discourse Analysis of this transcribed text. So I had to write this nonsense and apparently meaningless utterance. And then there is 'I've I've' with these weird looking tags <}><->I've<=>I've. They show actually repetition, and of course again I had to search in ICE Manual for tags of Repetition and I got these. So I pasted them and added the repeated words according to the example given there in the manual. And this way it goes on. You listen, you type it. When you see overlapping, repetition, hesitation, uhms you mark it, when you do not understand a spoken word you replay it, and in the mean time you consult the manual as well for every new phenomenon you encounter so you can record it properly. Now you may understand why it is very difficult to transcribe a text, and why it is necessary to TAG it. But as you practice you will be more faster and accurate, you'll consume less time.

Hopefully this small effort will help. Ask me in the comments of this post if you are still unable to get what I wanted to say, or if you want details of some specific area.

Drinking Water in Faisalabad

Faisalabad is considered third biggest city of Pakistan according to population. In last 10 to 15 years its population has grown rapidly. People from surrounding cities, towns and villages have moved to the city and lots of surrounding villages and towns are also now a part of the city Faisalabad. Like Lahore, we have a canal passing through the heart of city called Rakh Branch. It enters from east and passing through the city leaves the city on western side. Like Clifton area of Karachi, the area around the Canal is considered to be the most elite area of the city. There are several old colonies and towns like Peoples Colony and Madina Town, and now there are lots of new colonies being constructed on the outer edges of the city along the Canal.
The city has an environment of industrialization. Labour from all over Punjab comes here to work in Textile Mills. Before the construction of mills and factories, the area and land was used for agriculture. Faisalabad is not an area which receive lots of rain, so the canal was and is used for irrigation. The underground water is not drinkable in most areas of city. Only the areas near canal, where canal water has seeped into earth, have drinkable water. So the areas near canal are kind of elite areas of Faisalabad. But with the passage of time as the water level is dropping, old undrinkable water is showing its face now. The old towns like Mansoorabad which once had sweet drinkable water from underground, now the water cannot be drunk from these areas. Water and Sewerage Authority is not providing drinkable water in most areas near canal for last 5 years or so. Due to this, the Can Mafia has taken over the city. People, especially Pathans, have come to city and they supply water in blue colour cans previously used as textile chemical containers. They load these cans on carts and Qingqee Loaders and supply water to virtually every place in the city, especially 3 to 4 kilometer far areas now totally depend on these water suppliers. To fulfill the needs of these suppliers, people have bored and installed heavy tubewell motors along the Canal right from Mansoorabad to Nisar Colony. These heavy motors suck drinkable water from underground a few meters away from canal. And I am thinking how much time we have when the water near the Canal will also become undrinkable? What would we do then? Would we start drinking Canal water directly?

New Laptop, New Profession and New Academic Year

After struggling for more than a year finally I've got a new laptop for my personal and professional use. The HP ProBook 4530s Core i5 is just what I wanted. The 500 GB Hard Disk, 1 GB Redeon graphics card and Windows 7 64bit makes it a sexy choice. Although I am a bit disappointed with quite low native resolution of the LED screen but it would for me. And screen shots will be uploaded some other day ;-).

I am leaving school finally and they'll be notified about my departure in next 3 months. Now I want to focus on online jobs. I am working as a Community Manger for Netlog's Urdu version. I am working as a translator as well, and now I'll concentrate on English blogging as well. The things are going to be online from now on.

This year has become another transition year for me. After 1 year of absence and working as a mule for money, I am going to resume my studies in M Phil. And I am hoping to perform same way as I was doing in MSc Applied Linguistics. And I am concentrating to get some research papers published. This last thing is a bit tricky because I had to complete this task last month but as I had no mode, I couldn't complete it.

So this was on my mind. :-)

Questions

I've been in touch with Star Trek series for a couple of years now. Reading Global Science, the relativity theory, time and light speed are not unfamiliar topics for me. And while reading fiction is the most favourite thing for me as a hobby, I specially liked the notion of science fiction. After release of Star Trek 2009, I developed a great interest in these movies and tv series. In 2010 I had seen all 6 episodes of Star Trek TV Series. But that was not satisfactory for me, I wanted more. Now in mid 2011 I found Start Trek Next Generation Series. And I am spending my weekends watching this series.
It is great to see how advance we can become in next centuries, our next generations would get benefit out of it. But the assumptions on which these science fictions are created raise lots of questions.
The characters of STTNG think the notion of God as something primitive, would we leave the religions behind at such a peak of progress? Personally my belief gets stronger every time when I think about how vast the Universe is, with how much care it is created and being maintained. There is certainly someone behind it.
If someone is behind it, does this mean he is beyond space and time? He should be, otherwise how he can manage such a grand creation. The questions of space and time make me puzzled and confused. I am unable to determine what would happen to us when we'll pass the barrier of light speed. Would it truly be the beginning of an era? Would we ever be able to get light speed even? If yes what would happen to the system of communication which is based on light speed radio waves. How such ships would be able to communicate with each other?
All these things are presented in STTNG in a very simple way, but things are not so simple as the writers assume at the time of writing. There are lots of questions, lots of queries, looks like my grand sons and great grand sons might be able to get the answers of these questions, when they'll encounter such realities. For me currently, this current world is self sufficient in a hell of problems which can engage us for next several centuries, if we could make through these centuries.

On The Internship

Finally I am out of the university after the final exam of 4th semester. After the finals my intent was to have some rest and then get admission in M Phil. But nor rest neither M Phil looks near to me. I was called just after a few days by the department for internship at Little Angles School System. And due to thesis yet to submit, I may not be able to get admission in M Phil this year. So I am on the job actually with a little less than 10000 rupees are paid to me.

The school has three branches in the city and I am in the main branch on Canal Road. It is well built and having an organized structure. Because this is the first time for me to get a chance to be a teacher, it is exciting for me to learn and observe how things are done practically regarding language teaching. My bookish knowledge regarding teaching language will be converted to a more practical one. Currently I am just observing and learning as 7th class, to whom I would be teaching has still to come after summer vacation. This observation is giving me much as well I am trying to analyse the situation critically.

The school offers Cambridge O Levels and A Levels as well as local Matric and Intermediate courses for students. Cambridge students are obviously considered superior on others. The course of this university is good for English. But what I got from this, is that it focuses on reading and writing very much. Listening is also there but lesser, and there is no component of spoken part. The students have to learn reading comprehension, writing narratives and summaries and understand and then write after listening. All this, in my opinion, very much revolves around teaching writing, although this writing is superior than that of local English teaching system which utilizes translation method to teach English.

Another thing is the use of foreign materials. What I am going to teach is printed in Singapore, having all the contexts and pictures from that country. There is a lack of local touch in language teaching. Perhaps they think that foreign materials are more trust worthy to teach English. Although this is true that local materials are not available for these levels, or if available are not of that much standard. Even the books created by provincial text book boards are thin and make only one third or one forth of their Cambridge counter part.

These were some initial thoughts about my new activity, going to be a language teacher. I'll be writing more on this topic. 

Indian Rupee Gets Symbol Like Dollar, Pound

India is making its international presence more stronger and influential day by day. Their economy, like of China, is one of the biggest economies of the world. Their currency is getting attention due to high investments by multi nationals. Now the Indian Rupee has got a symbol.

And where is Pakistan?
چھڈو جی

Prezi: Presentations with Zooming

EFL 2.0 posted a presentation on the use of technology in language teaching. The thing I liked about it is the idea of creating a zoom able presentation. Prezi is a nice way to create innovative presentations. The website structure tells that it uses Adobe Flash for presentation creating, another Flash product.

Technology and Teaching Languages on Prezi