Overlapping talk: transcribed in ELAN, export to word

Hello

I have transcribed a multiparty interaction in ELAN. I annotated the talk of every participant on a separate tier. I would like to export my transcription to word but when I do this, the overlapping talk between different participants disappears. Is there a way to display overlapping talk in your transcription when you export it to word?

Thank you in advance!

Kind regards
Laura

Which export function did you use (tab delimited text, Traditional Transcript Text, other?)?
Visualization of the overlap in just text is not well supported in ELAN, but we can see if there is anything to improved on what you did so far.

-Han

Dear Han

I have tried the following export options: tab delimited text, Traditional Transcript Text, Interlinear text and HTML. None of them seem to visually show the overlapping talk between the different participants.

Kind regards
Laura

Dear Laura,
So, you already tried almost all export options, I’m afraid ELAN has not much more to offer in that sense.
What you can do is either include screenshots in your Word document or visually align text in Word.
(In case you used brackets (’[’ and ‘]’) in your annotations to indicate overlapping speech, it might be possible to transfer your data to an application that supports that convention?).

Dear Han,

I wondered if there has been any more on this?

When I get a preview before the export (to Interliner text), it shows all the overlaps perfectly and exactly as I need it. However, like Laura said, after the export, it becomes more like a play script with no illustration of overlap or simultaneous talk.

If there is anything I can do to secure the formatting, please do let me know - my transcript is an hour’s talk between 12 speakers, so formatting it all manually will take a very long time! As I can see in the preview that the layout is there, I am really hoping there is a way to reflect that in Word.

Thank you so much,
Chloe

Dear Chloe,

I didn’t emphasize this before, it seems, but several text export options rely on the use of a fixed width (or monospaced) font. So, if you copy and paste exported text to Word, you’ll have to apply a fixed width font.
I would guess that if the preview looks good, it should be possible to get proper export output.

In the meantime, a new export function has been added that you might want to give a try, “Time-aligned Interlinear Text”. The “Traditional Transcript Text” export now also provides limited support for alignment based on “[” (opening square bracket) characters within annotations. (Both functions depend on the use of fixed width fonts.)

-Han

Dear Han,

Thank you so much for this!

Could you let me know the width I should select, or what the standard width is? I have been messing around with the settings so much to try and make it work that it is currently set to 67.

Thank you so much again,

Chloe

I’m afraid that is a matter of trying out what works best. If the output has to fit in a Word document, it will depend on the document size, page margins and font size. There’s no general rule that works for all cases.

-Han