ABSTRACT
Using standard orthography and punctuation makes for a readable transcription and also one that allows you to search it easily. If people are doing sociolinguistic research that is less concerned with finding and every instance of a particular word and instead is more concerned with how speakers express themselves at a moment in time, then respellings might appeal to them as a way of capturing the flavour of real speech. The style of spelling and use of punctuation is one of the ways that transcription for conversation analysis (CA), discourse analysis (DA) and variationist sociolinguistics (VSLX) differ. Researchers working on sign languages take it for granted that video are the basic medium and that any transcription needs to cover manual and facial gestures, and the field has a well-established set of standards for the kinds of features that need to be annotated in the transcription. Transcribers may characterise a speaker in terms of social status, character and linguistic abilities.
