Conversation-analytic transcription of Arabic-German talk-in-interaction

The paper deals with the process of computer-aided transcription regarding Arabic-German data material for interaction-based studies. First of all, it sheds light upon some major methodological challenges posed by the conversation-analytic approaches: due to current corpus technology, the reciprocity, linearity, and simultaneity of linguistic activities cannot be reconstructed in an analytically proper way when using the Arabic characters in multilingual and bidirectional transcripts. The difficulty of transcribing Arabic encounters is also compounded by the fact that Spoken Arabic as well as its varieties and phenomena have not been standardised enough (for conversation-analytic purposes). Therefore, the second part of this paper is dedicated to preliminary, self-developed solutions, namely a systematic method for transcribing Spoken Arabic.