Webbasierte Tools für die Transkription und Analyse von Reden. Hilfreiche Instrumentarien für die (Polito)Linguistik

Abstract

To conduct a linguistic analysis of political speeches, it is essential to obtain their transcription. However, not all speeches delivered by political representatives are readily transcribed and accessible. Moreover, transcribing speeches that last more than some minutes is time-consuming and for this reason written texts, short political speeches, or speeches that already have an official transcription are more likely to be considered by linguistic disciplines. Tools and technology developed by the speech processing community facilitate the transcription process. The audio signal tends to be neglected in some linguistic disciplines, which focus exclusively on the content or the argumentative structures of speeches, without considering the relevant role of voice characteristics in the success or effectiveness of a speaker. In fact, this often happens in politolinguistics and this paper presents a possible alternative path for transcription of political speeches with BAS web tools, based on previous studies carried out for transcription in other disciplines. The use of such tools opens the perspective of including the signal in the analyses. The corpus of speeches used as examples was collected for a doctoral project on political speeches in Germany and Italy. The aim of this study is not to outline a technical perspective on the development and commands of transcription tools or software, but to show how to solve common problems that researchers in political language could face, once they want to consider for instance longer speeches delivered at political conventions and not transcribed before. Based on the problems and solutions that have been found for the doctoral project, researchers in the (polito)linguistic field could also determine whether the presented tools are applicable for their research and perhaps useful to make time-consuming tasks as transcribing easier. The article will present such tools, discuss their advantages and disadvantages, and conclude with examples and recommendation of best practices.