Volume 29, Issue 5

The articles in this special issue argue that entextualization—the process by which circulable texts are produced by extracting discourse from its original context and reifying it as a bounded object—is an indispensable mechanism for the construction of institutional authority. More specifically, they demonstrate that one particular mode of entextualization, that involving the inscription of speech into writing, plays an especially important role in modern institutions, as the transfixing power of the written record endows the institution with an enormous advantage in presenting itself as an authoritative voice that can define, describe, and discipline its subjects. The contributors to this special issue illustrate the role of entextualization in the consolidation of institutional power through the critical analysis of linguistic representation within three key institutions—the law, the media, and the academy—in a variety of languages and cultures in North America, Europe, and Asia.

A growing body of discourse-analytic studies demonstrates that within the legal system, spoken language that undergoes entextualization is transformed in a variety of sociopolitically consequential ways. Through the analysis of a legal case involving the institutional entextualization of incriminating language—an FBI summary log of wiretapped telephone calls between suspected drug dealers—the article argues that practices of professional hearing and transcription on behalf of institutions of law enforcement systematically work to the disadvantage of suspects and defendants. At the same time, discourse analysts who intervene in the justice system as linguistic experts offer competing representations of suspects' and defendants' language rooted in their own practices of professional hearing and their own institutional goals. Legal entextualizations, whether weighted in favor of or against defendants, present dialogically constructed representations of discourse as monologic and objective facts in order to foster an ideology of institutional neutrality. This process allows legal institutions to “create their own reality” by regimenting talk through textual representation in order to promote their own authority and interests.

This article explores the link between asylum seekers' verbal performances and their transidiomatic entextualization by documenting the procedure through which asylum seekers' claims are examined by judicial authorities and translated into a public record. Every year thousands of displaced people seek the protection of various European states by filing political asylum claims which are examined by national commissions. In their depositions, asylum seekers are interviewed by immigration officials for approximately an hour. After this interview they are presented with a judgment: a short text that summarizes their story and spells out the commission's decision on the case. The claim of this article is that these commissions are structurally unaware of the need to address the transidiomatic nature of the hearing. In this light, the entextualization of the asylum seeker's verbal performance becomes much more than the process of rendering a single instance of talk into text, detachable from its local context; rather, it reveals how public officials, faced with the intrinsic alterity of the asylum seekers, rely on commonsensical, but at times inappropriate, knowledge of social, cultural, and linguistic values to construct, process, and eventually determine the validity of each claim. As a result, this procedure is fraught with unexamined assumptions about language, national identity, and communicative competence, leading to egregious violations of the asylum seekers' human rights.

This article presents an analysis of two different practices of subtitling on Korean television. It claims that these practices constitute different strategies of entextualization that produce authoritative regimentations of languages and discourses through manipulation of the intertextual distance between the original text and its representation. In the first type, impact captioning, or intralanguage subtitles on entertainment shows, different styles of subtitles distinguish the authoritative voice of the institution from the voices of ordinary speakers, allowing the media institution to simultaneously exploit speakers' problematic discourse for humorous purposes and to maintain an official image of neutrality and morality. In the second type, translation subtitling, which translates speech in languages that are assumed to be incomprehensible to viewers, subtitles enable the media institution to position its viewers with respect to linguistic competence, a process that is mediated by the construction of subtitles as neutral representations of spoken discourse. Therefore, in both cases, entextualization of discourse through subtitles must be seen as a strategy for the projection of institutional authority, reflecting metadiscursive interactional work done by the producers of media texts as they engage in acts of regimentation.

This article examines the way that sociolinguistic authority and authenticity are constituted in media-based entextualization practices, focusing specifically on patterns of orthographic choice made in transcriptions on the companion websites of two large-scale, professional media productions about linguistic variation: the BBC Voices project in the U.K. and the American PBS series ‘Do You Speak American?’ Building on previous research that shows that nonstandard orthographies in transcripts stigmatize the speakers represented, the analysis examines the pattern of nonstandard orthographic depictions in these transcripts. The results show that while both expert and ‘ordinary’ speakers are depicted with nonstandard spellings, media subjects identified as dialect speakers are more often represented as being highly aligned with the nonstandard spellings used to record their speech. These nonstandard spellings contribute to their depiction as authentic speakers, but undermine their access to sources of sociolinguistic authority, including using unmarked, ‘standard’ language and maintaining control over self-representations. These specific processes of media entextualization are linked to the contrast between expert/academic and lay knowledge and the ‘authentic’ voices that motivate these broadcasts and act as a media ‘hook’. As this contrast is reproduced in oral, textual, and visual representations, it reinforces the divide between the authentic and the authoritative speaker.

Transcripts are exemplars of ethnographic translation, juxtaposing languages, genres, and perspectives. As such, they become sites where the author comments on the commensurability of not only languages, but also cultures. With no single standardized practice for transcribing American Sign Language (ASL), the variation in forms of transcription are the inscriptions of different approaches to the vexed question of the commensurability, or undistorted translation, between ASL and English and between Deaf culture and an academic audience. This article looks at three modes of transcription—broad translations, glosses, and pictorial representations—as well as how they are framed by their presentation and the surrounding text, and considers the implications of their use in a variety of anthropological, sociological, and linguistic studies. Transcripts are recognized as key sites at which academics take positions on different issues within the Deaf community, including linguistic variation and the very definition of deafness.

In this article I examine a collaborative transcription activity between an American linguistic anthropologist and her two French consultants. Transcription is analyzed here as a discursive process between the three co-transcribers that shapes a locally and interactionally produced document: the scription. Instead of examining the transcription as a product, the tradition in the literature, I focus on the process that produces the scription as text. I show how the co-transcribers' verbalizations of their choices enable us to understand how a scription is constructed from and around layers of authorships and conflictive authorities. I argue that a transcription process should be conceived of as a chain of embedded activities (viz., listening, reading, video watching, and writing). I show how these activities unfold sequentially, each of them providing a (re)contextualizing frame for the next. I submit that a transcription is a complex process of entextualizations spread over several points in time, whereas a scription mediates further entextualizations through its own circulation.