The Nature of Phonetic Transcription

This chapter discusses the nature of phonetic transcription. It provides a brief historical overview of the use of phonetic transcription in linguistic research. A phonetic transcription can be defined as the written representation of a speech utterance through specially developed symbols usually organized in a phonetic alphabet. More precisely, a phonetic transcription is the result of an auditory, and often partly visual, analysis of an utterance into a linear sequence of discrete units of speech represented by phonetic symbols. In many linguistic disciplines, phonetic transcriptions have been used to obtain written records of speech data that were subsequently employed as a basis for research. Nowadays phonetic transcriptions are generally made by using specially developed tools that allow to listen to the speech while simultaneously looking at visual, graphical representations while producing the transcriptions in a tier-based structure. Even when using more advanced tools, making phonetic transcriptions is still extremely time-consuming and costly.