In the academic discipline of linguistics, transcription is an essential part of the methodologies of (among others) phonetics, conversation analysis, dialectology, and sociolinguistics.
Systems for phonetic transcription thus furnish rules for mapping individual sounds or phones to written symbols.
Systems for orthographic transcription, by contrast, consist of rules for mapping spoken words onto written forms as prescribed by the orthography of a given language.
Spoken language, on the other hand, is a continuous (as opposed to discrete) phenomenon, made up of a potentially unlimited number of components.
Transcription systems are sets of rules which define how spoken language is to be represented in written symbols.
Over four decades, for the majority of which she held no university position and was unsalaried, Jefferson's research into talk-in-interaction has set the standard for what became known as conversation analysis (CA).
[1] This system is employed universally by those working from the CA perspective and is regarded as having become a near-globalized set of instructions for transcription.
[2] A system described in (DuBois et al. 1992), used for transcription of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English[3] (SBCSAE), later developed further into DT2.
[6][7][8] Transcription was originally a process carried out manually, i.e. with pencil and paper, using an analogue sound recording stored on, e.g., a Compact Cassette.
For the latter, automated transcription is achieved by a speech-to-text engine which converts audio or video files into electronic text.