My first attempt on transcription was really unsuccessful: on a 52-minute class, I transcribed only two lines of the Powell Diary. Since I was not a native speaker of English, I unconsciously believed that this assignment was too hard for me. I was diffident and uncertain about every word of my transcription. It was on Wednesday that I became getting on track, when I worked with Jerry. We always have the same opinion on the transcription of a word and this concurrence made me feel more confident about my work.
Besides diffidence, there were still many challenges that I had to overcome during my transcription. First, there were quite a few characters that looked similar on Powell’s Diary. For example, the uppercase I,S, and lowercase b, f were pretty similar, and lowercase t looked like uppercase L while the word so was similar to Lo or to.
Moreover, since Powell’s first language was not English, he made some misspellings, which was confusing. They was written as thay, there as thear, their as thare, were as ware, and troublesome as trublesome, etc. The most challenging part for a foreign student was some uncommon words. Take “kegg” as instance, if I had been living in U.S. for a long time, I could have been able to make a guess at it even though the “k” was illegible. The capitalization of words did not seem to be difficult, but it actually troubled me a lot. Powell made some unusual capitalization. As transcribers, we should write the capitalization exactly as original archives, for we were transcribing, not translating, whereas I always unconsciously wrote the lowercase forms of the words.
