SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Spanish-Welsh Bilingualism in Patagonia

This workshop will deal with the process involved in building multilingual corpora, including the initial stage of planning, data collection, data transcription and analysis.  It will draw on our experience at Bangor building Welsh-English, Spanish-English and Welsh-Spanish corpora.  In relation to data collection we will discuss the recruitment of participants, the method of recording (including how to minimise the effects of the Observer’s Paradox), the administering of background questionnaires, the provision of consent forms and other ethical considerations.  As for data transcription I will describe the use of CHAT for the representation of multilingual data and will discuss the issue of language marking as well as common problems that arise in transcription.  We will also discuss both manual and automatic glossing and translation of the data. Regarding data analysis we will discuss both the use of CLAN for automatic analysis and other qualitative and quantitative approaches.