I’m working on a magazine article which requires a number of interviews. Since most of the people I’m interviewing are deaf or severely hard-of-hearing, I can’t do a typical phone interview, so I decided to do the interviews using Facebook chat. This brings up an interesting question of journalistic style and integrity.
Even careful writers have a tendency to use chat abbreviations (e.g., BTW, OTOH, IIRC) and not worry much about punctuation when chatting online. When quoting them in the article, should you leave their text as-is, or write it out, correct typos, and re-punctuate it as you would for a phone interview?
Examples (these are not actual text from the interviews):
[ol]
[li]Should “imo legislation is reqd” be turned into “In my opinion, legislation is required”?[/li][li]Should “i think so but im not sure” be transcribed as “I think so, but I’m not sure”?[/li][li]Should “The ada reqires equal axs!” become “The ADA requires equal access!”?[/li][/ol]
My gut says that in all three examples, I should do cleanup as shown.
What do you think? In case it affects your opinion, this is not for a scholarly journal – it’s for a trade association magazine.
Absolutely clean it up, for the same reason you don’t keep the umm uhhs and repeated words in voice interviews.
How about this…ASL doesn’t translate directly to English, word-for-word. But if you were interpreting and then writing out an interview you wouldn’t write what they literally signed (“I go sleep wake up refresh”) but the English translation.
So IMHO I would correct what they say. I would also correct it for a non-ASL speaker.
If they were speaking to you in English you wouldn’t type all the “uhs” or “uhms” or stutters or even mis-pronunciations would you? (I realize that’s slightly different)
I have a BS in journalism and actually did some chat interviews when I was in college. Sadly, only for my own online publication. But IM was so new that I never brought it up with the professors as we always only did telephone or in-person interviews.
Yes, treat it like a phone interview. Typing out the abbreviations expresses the intent of the interview subjects and it’s much more readable.
I think you should transcribe the interviews with cleanup.
This is interesting to me, as I’m in the middle of a project considering the ethics of oral transcription from the perspective of the disciplines of anthropology, history, journalism, and political science.
Transcribing your examples as a journalist or political scientist, cleanup is the appropriate course.
Transcribing as an anthropologist, cleanup is completely inappropriate.
Transcribing as a historian is dicey–there is more than one consideration.
Since you’re transcribing as a journalist, I think your answer is clear. Clean it up and transcribe it as grammatically proper as you can.