Condiciones del Entorno Laboral

I have discussed several theoretical issues relating to CA transcription process above. Armed with the discussions, specific CA convention principles that I employed in this study will be explicated in this sub-section. Specifically, vernacularisation that I briefly touched upon in the previous section, will be expanded further. Then, the actual layout and page design in this thesis will be described at the end of this section, whilst highlighting several issues in relation to translation.

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3.2.3.1 Granularity and readability

Granularity signifies that the level of details that a transcriber put on her/his selected segments. The issues of granularity firstly suggested by Jefferson, who is one of the pioneers of CA. Jefferson (1985) claims that transcribing data is one method we attempt to get our hands on actual interaction in order to investigate social orders with various details within it. She emphasises that the salient aspect of this process is that CA analysts try to go through astute observation of actual occurrences whilst representing details of the talk. Grounded on this notion, she invented a transcription system when she worked for Sacks (Ten Have, 2007). At that time, she employed a modified version of orthography and ‘a large repertoire notation symbols’ to show how the talk was generated by interactants (Wagner, 2013). This system aims to deliver ‘hyperabundance of detail’ of talk-in-

interaction, therefore, it enables other researchers to refute proposed findings or add alternative lines of analysis based upon a different version of analytic observation (Hazel, et al, 2012).

As noted previously, as a CA analyst, I also had to locate my transcription procedure in the continuum between standardization and vernacularisation and I decided to follow the Jefferson’s convention, which is inclined to the

vernarcularsation side. In other words, the transcripts in this thesis do not completely adhere to existing standard writing conventions. Rather, I

accommodated idiosyncrasies and heterogeneity of the speech in the collected data and attmpt to re-present the spoken interaction as accurate as possible. Regarding this issue of granularity and vernacularisation, Jenks (2011) states that there are two options when it comes to vernacularisation; the first one is to employ non-standard spelling and the second option is to use the International Phonetic Alphabet in order to ‘phonetically capture pronunciational particulars’ (ibid: 19). What I select for this study is the non-standard spelling, which is ‘more accessible and literarily appealing’ (ibid: 20).

Nevertheless, the distinction between vernacularisation and standardisation was somewhat vague in reality, as my excerpts did not lead to either cartoon like

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representation or a strictly organised standard orthography. Although I locate my theoretical orientation relating to transcription in vernacularisation, several aspects of standardisation also appears throughout the excerpts in this thesis as I was strategic in my decision with respect to the representation.

In considering aforementioned theoretical aspects of transcription, I was critically engaged with the dichotomy between standardisation and vernacularisation throughout my transcription process. This, in turn, enables me to maintain a balance between different levels of vernacularisation, thus, the levels of

vernacularisation vary in different interactional moments. For example, either the interviewer or interviewee or both speakers are oriented to pronunciation

particulars due to misunderstanding, vernacularisation made salient in that particular transcripts (Jenks, 2011).

I would like to also emphasise that the production of standardised transcripts at the beginning of my analysis was a meaningful process. It offers a preliminary resource for an initial analysis, specifically it enables me to quickly search for a specific occurrence in my dataset. For example, I transcribed the whole

interaction of my first, third and fourth interviews in accordance with standard orthography. This was a valuable procedure to get closer to my data whilst exploring various discernible interactional phenomena. Furthermore, it assists not only to produce subsequent CA transcripts of selected fragments, but also to excavate key analytic foci of my thesis.

Based upon the related theories of transcript, the next section will discuss more practical aspects of transcription, especially, how the excerpts in this thesis are presented in terms of the layout and design.

3.2.3.2 Transcript layout and page design

I utilised several suggestions from Ten Have (2007), Hepburn & Bolden (2013) and Wagner (2013) when it comes to transcript layout and page design of the

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excerpts in the current study. Put simply, the transcripts follow the standard layout suggested by Jefferson (2004), all the aforementioned studies are based upon. Thus, the excerpts in this thesis include temporal and sequential relationship concerning with timing of utterances (Hepburn & Bolden, 2013). Along with them, elements of speech delivery are incorporated, such as ‘pitch, loudness, tempo, degrees of emphasis and voice quality’ as well as uncertain hearings and the researcher’s comments’ (ibid: 58).

A general look of a CA transcript has words as spoken along with line numbers (Ten Have, 2007). As mentioned briefly, it should have temporal and sequential relationship associated with how different parts of conversation are linked with time. In this sense, timing is imperative in CA transcription conventions as a fine coordination of talk and ongoing activities with time is highly valued. How each part of talk is related in time is particularly revealed through overlapping talk, latching, gap and pause.

Prosodic aspects of talk-in-interaction are another crucial parts of the transcripts in this thesis. That is, global intonation features such as TCU-final intonation should be indicated by punctuation marks including period, comma, question mark and inverted question mark (Hepburn & Bolden, 2013). Forms of emphasis (underline), prolongation (colons), loudness/quietness (capital letters/degree signs), intonation contour (arrow and combinations of underscore and colons (Jefferson, 2004)), tempo of speech (less-than/more-than symbols) voice quality (smiley voice and suppressed laughter) should be documented as well. If

necessary, multimodal details can be included, such as ‘beginning and extension of participant’s actions; gaze toward other participants and away from them respectively, gesture preparation, climax and retreat’ (Wagner, 2013:5). In sum, I included the suggested elements in my transcripts, which are all linked with the CA transcription convention (see appendix A and appendix C).

In the following sub-section, I will discuss an issue directly linked with

transcribing non-English data, which is a significant aspect of data representation in this study.

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3.2.3.3 Translation

Transcribing/Translating interaction is inherently relevant to this study as majority of the dataset is Korean. This area touches upon another political dimensions of representation as the choices that researchers make is bound up with their own disciplinary identities as well as the cultural/linguistic identities of the speakers in the talk-in-interaction (Bucholtz, 2007; Jenks, 2011; 2013). Therefore, it was inevitable to face several challenges when it comes to employing CA transcription conventions to the Korean interaction and providing accurate translation for each utterance.

The consensus in the EMCA field in terms of translation practices: a CA practitioner has to employ a three-line transcription when she/he presents data composed of a language/languages other than English; the first line is original language, the second line is word-by-word translation (or morpheme-by- morpheme translation) and the third line is idiomatic English translation (Ten Have, 2007; Sidnell, 2009; Jenks 2011; Hepburn & Bolden, 2013; Moerman, 1988; Liddicoat, 2011). Although there is often only one translation line, when languages have a similar syntactic structure to English. In my case, I produce excerpts having three-line in a row as Korean has a significantly different structure. Some claimed that presenting only the translation allows readers to figure out data more easily. It is arguably acceptable as most readers for this thesis including my supervisors, examiners and colleagues are not able to read and understand the original language. Three-line transcription has another pitfall as it consumes many pages crowded with lots of written sources, which might decrease readability (Duranti, 1997).

Nonetheless, I would argue that it is still valuable to put the Korean conversation as its original form in the first line of every excerpt, which ‘allows readers to understand what originally has been said without any syntactic and semantic modifications’ (Jenks, 2011: 99). This abides by a fundamental principle of CA research such as bottom-up and data-driven as mentioned above, which puts great emphasis on the accuracy of the transcripts as a rendering of the original data.

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decision in the translation process’, for example, if a Korean CA analyst read the data analysis (Duranti, 1997: 156).

For the original interaction, I chose the writing system of Korean language and tried my best to add the suggested components from the CA transcription convention as accurate as possible. Subsequently, I provided two lines of

translation; word-by-word gloss encompassing word-for-word direct translation. In the second line, I also employed the CA convention to the utterances. In the third line, an idiomatic English gloss was delivered in order to describe contextual as well as interactional meaning of the conversation (Sidnell, 2009). In particular, I attempted to render nuanced translation for the third line of every excerpt in this thesis, which is able to give contextual information underlying the talk in

interviews. The contextual information here is deemed as ‘not only of the immediate context but also of more broader assumptions including participants’ ways of the use of language with social action’ (Duranti, 1997: 154).

Due to the different language system, especially the different character system, several elements amongst CA conventions, were not able to document in the excerpts. For instance, there are no capital letters (capital letters indicate loud sounds relative to the surrounding talk, as I mentioned previously) in the Korean character system, thus, I ended up with underlying (underlines indicate

stress/emphasis and accentuation) the corresponding words. Some Korean CA analysts have already used this alternative practice in their studies (see Oh, 2010). In 3.2.3 section, I have outlined both the theoretical and practical issues with respect to CA transcription convention in order to show I have engaged with the production of CA excerpts in this thesis. In the forthcoming section 3.2.4, I will describe the foundations of CA, focusing on interactional structures.