Abstract :
As multilingual research from relatively under-studied contexts have started to appear more often in mainstream linguistic-ethnographic-oriented research, issues related to transcription and representation of naturally occurring interactions have gained methodological importance. This holds true especially for linguistic data that brings together languages with varying scripts. While fidelity to recorded data is a matter of discussion on its own, the relationship between the quality of transcripts and the amalgam of languages/scripts to be represented deserves closer attention. In the case of the Turkish-Arabic interface, for instance, issues related to loanwords from Arabic into Turkish or their level of entrenchment in the Turkish language need to be addressed well in the process of transcription and interpretation. Likewise, English borrowings in Turkish need to be closely monitored in order to understand whether they are simply lexical insertions or loanwords. These matters are inherently related to the quality of transcripts involving these languages.
As part of the project “Contemporary Linguistic Diversity in Ä°stanbul” (BoÄŸaziçi University Project Code: 15561SUP), this paper seeks to address some methodological challenges during the process of representing multilingual data collected from a group of Syrian immigrants who have settled and started to live in Ä°stanbul within the last five years. Drawing on naturally occurring interactions, the analyses will center on the challenges multilingual, multscriptual data might pose in the process of transferring the recordings onto the paper. As linguistic ethnographic methodology would entail, participants’ intended meanings as gathered in the fieldwork process will be used as a backdrop to the interpretations of transcription. Implications for managing multilingual, multiscriptual data will be drawn.
