13th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research

Presentation Abstracts

HALPERT, Herbert • and WIDDOWSON, J.D.A.

Hearing Voices: transcribing and editing the oral narrative text

The transcription and editing of oral narrative is a perennial problem for all who work with material tape-recorded in the field. Theory and practice tend to be considerably distanced from each other. Despite continual calls for the verbatim transcription of texts in full context, comparatively few attempts have been made to realise this putatively ‘ideal’ mode of presentation. The marked disjuncture between theory and practice is particularly obvious when spoken narratives are edited for a general audience. Whereas academics favour transcriptions that present an accurate record of the spoken text within its context of performance, such presentations may prove inaccessible to the general reader.

Drawing on folktales recorded in the English-speaking tradition of the Canadian province of Newfoundland, this paper will first propose a method of verbatim transcription which aims to present spoken texts as accurately as possible within the limited conventions of normal orthography, augmented by an editorial apparatus designed to recreate the storytelling event in considerable textual and contextual detail. The methodology extends to English language texts some of the conventions employed by editors of oral narratives of many indigenous peoples. The aim is to present verbatim texts in prose, while preserving as far as possible the living language and rhetoric of the storyteller. The intention is to convey to the reader the essence of the actual voice of the speaker. The paper concludes with a consideration of how these essential features can best be preserved in a more accessible edition for the general reader.