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Showing posts from May, 2011

Heard of 'slow food'? How about 'slow fieldwork'...

My last couple of trips to Ngukurr to continue fieldwork on Marra have seen a slightly interesting development. Me and the Marra gang I work with at Ngukurr have continued our work nicely, going through old untranscribed recordings and also making new ones. What's changed on the past couple of trips is how we've been doing the transcriptions and translations. Last year when we started, most of the time I'd play recordings and the Marra gang would listen, repeat the Marra for me and translate it into Kriol, and I would enter it straight into ELAN. This is, I guess, a fairly standard way for linguists to work, with the linguist being the scribe and generally it was efficient and rewarding. But some sessions I'd encourage them to do the transcribing and practice/develop their Marra literacy skills. We had one long recording in particular that was perfect for this where the recording contained English translations and the Marra was only words and basic sentences. Most