Hey Dan,
This is a great question, and one that a lot of us working with
online transcripts and with non-standard Englishes constantly
face.
With a collection I was editing, working with writers from Asia,
Africa and Latin America, where the writers were not native
speakers and also not professionally used to writing, we faced a
similar dilemma which eventually, we resolved in the following
ways:
1. Except for when the syntax was so irregular that the citation
was unintelligible, we contacted the sources and checked if they
want to re-write it, or if our corrections were still
representing what they meant.
2. Like in oral ethnography projects, we retained the
irregularities of 'written speech', and we used that as a
precedence for retaining these 'errors'.
3. With different registers in the language, we retained them
without even high-lighting or italicising or pointing out those
irregularities, because that is a judgment call we did not want
to make, and we also thought that the onus of bias was on the
reader.
Hope this helps resolve some of your queries,
Warm regards
Nishant
On 01-02-2014 19:21, Daniel O'Donnell wrote:
I
have a question for advice from this group that might have
political implications.
In an article I'm about to submit, I cite a number of
discussions on this list and humanist about the use of language,
especially English. The authors are both native English speakers
and non-native speakers and, as is typical in emails, there are
a number of small typos. solecisms, and the like.
Currently, I have a note at the first citation indicating that
"as is normal in as conversational a medium as email
correspondence, the quoted passages have small typographical
errors and other solecisms. These have not been corrected or
otherwise noted." My reason for this is that I don't want to put
in a lot of sic or corrections in square brackets. Although I'm
a terrible typo offender myself, the case can be more
politicised it seems to me when dealing with non-native
speakers. I'm uncomfortable acting either as judge or, worse, in
my case, calling attention to "errors"--especially since I think
they are really more issues of register than actual errors.
I could silently correct them, of course, as well, but I don't
like that either, in case what I think is an obvious correction
turns out to misrepresent something.
What do other people think? I've seen sic used before as
a form of ad hominem attack and so I generally really hate using
it if I can avoid it. But since it also seems nuts to pepper the
correspondence with square brackets (and since that could have
the same effect as a lot of sics), I don't want to do that
either.
Is there a better solution than simply flagging the register
difference, as I currently do?
--
---
Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Canada
+1 403 393-2539
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