Transcribing in Oral History

As a beginning oral historian, how would you go about creating transcripts to faithfully represent the interview?

In my previous work, Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests, and Catholic Survivor  Narratives, a collective biography of twelve atomic bomb survivors, I included the following explanation in the Editorial Notes: 

I completed the translations from the conversations in Japanese between myself as the interviewer and the interviewees. I initially developed transcriptions in Japanese from each conversation. The resulting texts include pauses, omissions, false starts, back loops and so on. I made decisions about translation and interpretation at each stage, conscious of the dilemma as to what extent literal translation may be employed and how much contextual translation may be used for readability as well as addressing the complexity of interpreting oral text. I have tended towards translating contextually and creatively rather than producing a formal and literal equivalent of texts. An ellipsis […] in the text indicates that I have edited some data from the original interview. Clarifications and editorial notes are included in square brackets []. I take full responsibility for final translations.

There is a decades-long debate within the sub-field of Oral History about how to develop written transcriptions from interviews. Usually, the focus was on how to represent the spoken word on paper. Linda Shopes writes that transcription is itself an act of translation. What is likely lost includes nuances of voice, meanings conveyed by tone, cadence, velocity, and volume, nonverbal utterances (like sighs, laughter, and groans); social relationships; and interactive negotiation and the mental process of the encounter. As I wrote in my monograph: "In oral history, trauma is an often challenging and unconscious constituent in the interview, causing pauses, emotional responses and irruptions." Therefore, in this project, too, I include onomatopoeic sounds, repetition of phrases, laughing, and silence within the transcript. The emotive context is thus more evident and expressive in text, though in this case the reader will also be able to listen to the audio.

The process that Shopes suggests requires quite extensive intervention in the text on the part of the transcriber, including to avoid vernacular speech that may demean the narrator. Of course, some of the information lost to a listener is due to the inability to listen again, and the interviews presented here offer the opportunity to listen to the audio while also reading the transcript. In the modern digital world audio is more and more accessible, no less so in this digital project. Oral historian Francis Good writes that a balance must be reached between interpretation and leaving the transcript "as is," concluding that "transcription of the spoken word is more of an art than an exact science." In fact, she writes that some oral historians, including Loreen Brehaut and Barry York, have experimented with a free verse poetry approach to representing interviewees. Interviews also necessarily involve inter-subjectivity of the interviewer and the interviewee, as we discuss in the Teaching Plan for Interview #4 with Nakamura Mitsuru.

Translating Spoken Discourse: Considering "Settlers"

"The essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization?"

At the time of publishing this Hidden Christian World Heritage in the Gotō project, I am still in the early stage of thinking about colonialism within the Hidden Christian context. In interviews I did not consider colonialism, but I hope my work can be at least a contribution to anti-oppressive work. There are some layers of colonizing to consider in the context of this project: first Japan's own Imperial and nationalizing project beginning from 1868 with the Meiji 'restoration' that was itself a reaction and defense mechanism to repel a secondary colonialism, represented by "the Black Ships" of the colonial forces from Europe and the United States as they arrived on its shores in the late nineteenth century. The persecutions in which Japan's Hidden Christian people were controlled, imprisoned, policed, and transported to ensure the hegemony of the political elite occurred alongside and were influenced by these multiple imperial forces. The Hidden Christians were not Indigenous, but were "immigrants," as they arrived on the Gotō Islands from 1797 onwards. As immigrants they were permitted to take on land that was unwanted, uncultivated, difficult to farm, and remote (henpi 辺鄙）. And as you will see in the interviews, until recently, Hidden Christians were called "settlers" (hirakimon ヒラキもん) as a pejorative term that imagines them as a transient community without a home and still out of place on the islands.

This word, "settlers," offers a useful example in thinking about translating spoken discourse. Other ways of translating the same word might be as "cultivators," or "pioneers." The historical divisions in the community with respect to religion, class, and relationships must be understood in a nuanced way. How, then, might we translate the words jimoto 地元 and kaitakusha 開拓者 (hirakimon)? (See in particular Urakami Sachiko's interview). In one part of the excerpt of Urakami's interview, the interviewee (plus Kakimori Kazutoshi who is also in this interview) spend some time trying to explain the names that those who had been there prior to the Christians arrival gave to the Kirishitan arrivals after 1797. When is it appropriate in this kind of discussion to use terms in English like "settler" or "Indigenous"?

Decolonial Approaches to Oral History

As we find in Urakami's interview (Interview #2), where she was able to discern her own history told through her brother's voice, even the subjects and histories of this oral history project are often told through male voices. Many Hidden Christian women were marginalized not only by the misogynistic missionary enterprises of the sixteenth and then nineteenth centuries but also by their subaltern position in peasant communities. Francis, et al. write that for a project to be decolonial, it must be transparent about information, how data is collected, what is left in the communities, and how we leave those communities. One integral part of this is returning the interviews to the community itself after completion and another is working alongside colleagues that include two islanders, one from the South and one from the North, a Senior Advisor, and a research assistant who is local to the region. Achieving any kind of decentering and decolonizing feminist practice within this project was only made possible through the assistance of the women who collaborated on the transcriptions and considered their meanings together with me. Sakatani-san and Oosaki-san, both local guides on and around their own islands, were essential bridges into the contemporary and past Hidden Christian world, able to understand the local dialect, having knowledge of historical terminology and places, and offering insights along the way into the deeper meanings of the interviews.

On a practical level, we benefited from continuing improvements to auto-transcription. Though I was able to save time by automatically downloading the interview text, the interventions by Sakatani-san and Oosaki-san were critical. They worked from the auto-transcripts to develop the initial transcriptions, listening to the interviews to faithfully represent the speakers' discussions. Sometimes they included a translation of dialects into standard Japanese at the first stage. I then asked them to let me know what they thought was important about Hidden Christian memory and meaning within the transcripts, and I worked from those preliminary themes to make choices about the excerpts for publication on Japan Past & Present.

Finally, I developed the translations into English of the chosen excerpts, once again aiming for readability and nuance rather than literalism. I choose to translate contextually and creatively rather than directly. As you will be able to hear/read, we made the decision to leave the interviewer's questions and comments in the transcripts and audio  to reflect the inter-subjective process.

Japanese Translation: Sakatani Nobuko
Image Card Credit: Kelly Sikkema