Specifying Language in ELAN transcripts

For multilingual corpora, it’s important that each transcript specifies the language of the speech that has been transcribed.

In ELAN, each tier can have a language specified by setting the Content Language attributed of the tier. This is set using a dropdown box, which unfortunately is often populated with a single item: English (eng).

If the speech is in a language other than English, you will first have to add the desired language to the list of options.

Adding a new language option

  1. Click the Edit menu and select the Edit List of Languages… option.
    Edit List of Languages
  2. Click the lower dropdown box (directly above the buttons) and select the language you want.
    Select from All available languages
  3. Click Add.
    The selected language should appear in the upper dropdown box.
    Click Add
  4. Click Close

Defining the language for the transcript

Your transcript tiers now need to have this language selected.

  1. In the transcript, right-click the name of a transcript tier on the left and select the Change Attributes Of… option.
    Change Tier Attributes
  2. Change the Content Language option by selecting the language from the dropdown list.
    Change Content Language
  3. Click Change.
    The tier attributes window will close.
  4. Repeat the previous three steps for each transcript tier.

Speech in a Different Language

Sometime the speaker may include words or phrases in a different language from the rest of the transcript. It may be important to tag these words with the language they’re in (e.g. to ensure that after upload to LaBB-CAT, the pronunciation is correctly inferred).

LaBB-CAT recognises a transcription convention for tagging ‘code-switches’ (CS) into another language. Immediately following the word (i.e. with no intevening space) in square brackes the code “CS:” is added with the ISO 639 3-letter code for the language. e.g.

…me mudé de Christchurch[CS:eng] en 2004…

For longer phrases, the code-switch tag can be placed immediately before the first word and immediately after the last word, to mark those and all intervening words as being in a different language. e.g.

…it has a certain [CS:fre]je ne sais quoi[CS:fre] I think…

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