Transcribing (multilingual) voices: from fieldwork to publication

Several authors have argued in the past that transcribing is a political act: it involves judgements about how to represent voice in writing, what level of detail to choose, in which language(s) and for whom. This chapter provides an in-depth account of the processes and politics of multilingual transcribing. In reflexively analysing different transcript formats, it casts light on the complexities, challenges and opportunities that emerge in making collaborative decisions about the translation of speech to a written medium, as well as into other languages. The transcripts for the analysis have been pulled from a larger qualitative study on forced migrants’ linguistic integration. Special focus is thus given to transcripts that capture the sometimes unorthodox resources and mixed language practices of migrants, and to their reception in an interdisciplinary framework