Text Encoding Initiative

Levels of transcription

By levels of transcription is meant, essentially, how much of the information in the original — the accidentals or surface features of the text — the transcriber retains in his or her transcription. There is a great range of such surface features which may or may not be included in any transcription, particularly when one is working with manuscript materials. These features include:

• variant letter forms
• spelling
• capitalisation
• word division
• punctuation
• abbreviations
• page lay-out
• additions and deletions
• errors, inconsistencies etc.

At one end of the spectrum, there are transcriptions which may be called strictly diplomatic, in which every feature which may reasonably be reproduced in print is retained. At the opposite end we have fully modernised transcriptions, where the substantives, the words themselves, are retained but everything else is brought up to date. In between these two extremes a number of levels may be distinguished — semi-diplomatic, semi-normalised etc. — depending on how these original features are dealt with.