Transcription and translation of unwritten languages in American linguistics (1950s to 2000s) (original) (raw)

Introduction Starting in the 1940s American linguists made use of the work of Nida (1946) and Pike (1947) to guide them in their description of unwritten Amerindian languages. Voegelin (1954), however, was the first to establish a formal methodology for the collection, transcription and translation of data, which he called Multiple stage translation and which rendered systematic the relationship between transcription and translation. The transcription method, based on articulatory phonetics, established by the Voegelins (Voegelin & Voegelin 1959) is cited to this day in field manuals (Samarin 1967, Vaux & Cooper 2003). Voegelin's intermediary language, a combination of morphemic glosses and mathematical operations, also designed for computational use, did not however become a standard among linguists. It is only in 1982 that the glossing tier (also known as literal translation or morpheme by morpheme translation) was reworked, with Lehmann proposing a system for the alignment of...

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