Obtaining a Text

Rationale

Choose Appropriate Text Source

People vary in their ability to speak their own language, be expressive, and tell a good story. They also differ in their capacity to understand how they can help you. When you know the features that characterize good language assistants and storytellers and how to identify them in a person, you will be better able to find the person who will give you the best text possible.

Making an initial sociolinguistic or anthropological assessment of the locale may help you eliminate the need to screen people individually. For example, during one survey in Ethiopia the researchers discovered that married women came from other areas and each spoke a variety different from the one being surveyed. As a result, only an unmarried woman could have provided a useful text.

Evaluate and Elicit a Text

The quality of a recorded text depends greatly on how it is elicited. The more comfortable and adept you are at describing a good story and discussing the possibilities with the storyteller, the more likely it will be that you will obtain a text that meets or exceeds the criteria.

Choosing a poor story for the basis of a recorded text test can ruin the rest of the testing process and invalidate your results. The reasons can be as simple as the listeners' being familiar or even bored with the content. When you understand what characterizes a good recorded text, you will improve your ability to produce a good test. When you elicit a text, it's recommended that you ask for a summary of the story before recording it to make sure that the content is acceptable.

After settling on the storyline, you may wish to ask the storyteller questions that bring out details in the account or which evoke the emotional content. When these things are included in the final telling of the story, the recorded text will be richer and you will find it easier to create questions.

Record and Mark Text

When you ensure that a text and its questions have been recorded well, you reduce the possibility of people misunderstanding them for reasons that have nothing to do with comprehension. If you create new tracks at appropriate points or intervals in the text, then you will have an easier time translating it afterward.

Translate Phrases of Text

Mistranslation of the text is able to cause many problems. Immediately, a bad translation may cause you to incorrectly reject a text. Down the road, it may cause you to form questions that have nothing to do with what is truly heard. Translating the story correctly will improve your understanding of the text and open more sections of it to questioning.

Method

The following steps will walk you through the process of recording a text and translating it to a language that you and the translator share, preferably the LWC that you normally use on survey. In order to complete these steps, you will need to be familiar with the use of a MiniDisc (MD) recorder.

Eliciting and Recording a Text

1. Describe the type of story you want to the storyteller, and allow him or her some time to think of one and summarize it.
2. Check the main idea to be sure it meets the basic requirements. You might do this by having the storyteller tell you a bit of the story; it will also give him or her some practice telling the story.
3. Assemble the recorder equipment and double check that it is working properly.
4. Speak and record the language and/or dialect name, location, and date on the disc that you'll use for the story.
5. When you are ready to record the story, cue the storyteller to begin.
6. Insert "marks" to define tracks at every pause or at the end of what you suspect might be a sentence. Do not allow tracks to exceed ten seconds in length. Tracks that are longer than ten seconds can be difficult to translate accurately.
7. When you have finished recording the entire story, check that it has at least 30 tracks and that the duration of the story is between two and five minutes. If you have fewer than 30 tracks, or if the text is less than two minutes long, it may be difficult to generate the number of questions you will need. A very long text can make listeners tired and takes a long time to translate. If these requirements are not met, you should elicit another story.
8. Write the first and last track numbers and a description of the data on the disc's label. (Example: "Tracks 1-42: Sirba village hometown")
9. Thank the storyteller for his/her help. Be sure to write in the data notebook the information you want to keep for future reference about the storyteller: name, age, occupation, education level, birthplace, etc.

Translating a Text

1. Find another person to translate the story – the storyteller may tend to summarize the story in translating and fail to include details. Find a person who speaks the language of the text (L1) as a mother tongue, who is also fluent in the language of wider communication (LWC), and who didn't hear you record the text. Try to find a literate person, because the process will go faster if he or she can write the transcription and translation himself/herself.
2. Tell the translator that he/she will hear a story through the headphones and that you want him/her to write and translate what he/she hears into the LWC without leaving out or adding any details.
3. Prepare a separate translation notebook for him/her. Write the information about the story (e.g. language, location, date, storyteller) at the top of the page. Number each line so that you can refer to it easily. Write the first track number of the recorded text on the first line. Make sure the translator has a good supply of working pens.
4. Play the first track for the translator.
5. Ask him/her to write down (in the L1) exactly what he/she has just heard (in the L1). You may have to play the track two or three more times before the translator fully understands what you want him/her to do. Click here to see how the notebook might appear.
6. Ask the translator to write the translation of the first track beneath the transcription. He or she may be able to do a word-for-word translation at the same time.
7. Go through the entire text track by track once the translator understands the procedure. Write the track number next to its translation in the LWC. Leave at least two blank lines between each track's translation so the lines do not get confused.
8. The translator may ask you to combine a few tracks to create something he can understand. If this happens, write the numbers of both tracks on the same line in your notebook.
9. Look back over the whole translation and be sure that you have an accurate rendering of what the text (in the L1) says on each track. For example, if a track is eight seconds long and contains no pauses, but your translator has only given you a three word sentence in the LWC for the translation, you should recheck this and make sure that it is a good translation of the text.
10. Thank the translator for his/her help. Write his/her personal information in the data notebook just as you did for the storyteller.
11. Copy the transcription and translation to the data notebook so that you have a clear version to refer to.