Device: iPad
Software: Apple Notes
The Voice to Text script:
The story happened about two years ago during Chinese national day holidays it is a seven day holiday so most of the people would go back to their hometown‘s or go travel one night I got a call from a colleague and she said one foreign child and his whole family got detained in a local police station because he is he was not 18 years old by that time so the police asked for a guard and translator for under age child and wondered if I could go help then we communicated a little bit about the location and when do I expect to be there however nobody has any further information about why they were detained soon as possible when I got there I saw a couple of people were there including the mom of the boy and some people that I don’t really know and then I was told to go into a detention room without knowing what had happened I saw the kid and they asked me to translate for him the police officer who was interrogating him ask some general questions something about what do you usually do when you have this gathering with people so the student answered we will do some weekly gathering to share some cultural stuff with people Who are interested so inevitably some of the songs and culture that we share will involve religion because religion is such a big part of their daily lives when I asked how Austin they will do this kind of cultural sharing event the kid answered they will do it every Wednesday sometimes twice or three times a week repeat similar conversations multiple times that’s where I kinda had some ideas about maybe this is about religious problem I think the police officer know that he’s not going to get much out of this young boy so she let us walk out of that detention room and I met a couple of other people they say they are students in their second year university in a local universities who were called by their professors to offer a translation service because their professor who used to work with the police was out of town and it was late so they couldn’t get more such sophisticated translators to come at the lobby I talk to the kid a little bit more and his mom that’s where I know they were here since the afternoon they were doing some kind of their regular gathering today and suddenly more than 20 police officers broke into their venue and arrested them by the time I still didn’t have a clear picture of what exactly did they do wrong to get that kind of treatment suddenly I was calling to go upstairs into another room and translate for the boys father I was wondering where he was because I didn’t see him after I got to the police station after we sit down I put my phone on the table in a man who was not in his police uniform starting to ask questions and I was shocked by the first question he asked The police officer do you recognize me and I was like oh my god this is serious and the boys father answered no I don’t think so and then the police officer was like I was in that event at that time that you hosted and he kept asking questions like do you remember that you did this at this time or that time on very specific dates with how many people and then the conversations focused mostly on the father offering religious service illegally in China and the most awkward thing happened during the interrogation was my Siri can be activated multiple times during the interrogation with words that I think was nowhere close to the word Siri I was so afraid that the police that will say that I was recording or bugging the conversation eventually the family got deported for illegally giving religious service with charged in China without any kind of certification or license I loved the police station at about 3 AM in the morning and thought to myself wow that was an unexpected but interesting experience and I know more about laws regarding religions in my own country and no more about the idea of religious commissioner
How does the text deviate from conventions of written English
First of all, the most outstanding difference is the no punctuation. It is almost difficult to read because it is hard to identify the beginnings and ends of each sentence or paragraph.
In order to keep the flow of the speech, people would rarely think too much about proper word choices. While writing (or typing), we always tend to pay enough attention to tenses and grammar, and be selective about the vocabularies we use.
What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?
Some of the capitalized letters you see in the paragraph was because I pressed stop and restarted after I gathered my thoughts. There, we can see that the voice to text software does not take context into consideration. However, I did notice something amazing during the process which is when I speak the text was almost simultaneously appear on the screen, however, with letters I didn’t say. But just within a couple seconds, it self-corrected into the right words I said sometimes with small mistakes.
However, people have accents or different ways of speaking English. For me, as an ESL speaker, I am not very good at finishing words with proper ending syllables and pronunciation. For example, like the sound of past tense “-ed”, “say-said” and plural forms, also sometimes mixed up the gender words because in Chinese he and she and it are all pronounce as “ta”.
This is not the first time I tried to do this. I use this function quite a when I have to type a long paragraphs. And I have done it in both languages (English and Chinese). Overall, I found the outcomes of most softwares are surprisingly accurate if I speak clearly and properly.
What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why you consider them “mistakes”?
The most common mistakes from the voice-to-text, I would say is the completely wrong dictated words, ones that will heavily changed the original ideas I tried to convey.
For example:
– “the police ask for a guard” was supposed to be “guardian”
– “I loved the police station at about 3 AM” was supposed to be “left”
– “no more about the idea of religious commissioner” was supposed to be “know more about”
– “I asked how Austin they will do this kind of cultural sharing event” was supposed to be “how often”
The other one I will consider as mistake is where I tried to correct myself. However, that happens a lot when I speak in English. For example, “he is he was”.
What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
With a scripted story, we can labour over word choices, grammar and the English conventions to make the story easy to understand and engaging. As a second language speaker, I am used to conversations in English that are not scripted but normally for speeches or stories or more formal mediums of communication, I prefer to have a script so that I can make sure I am able to be understood. I also usually ask one of the foreign teachers I work with to edit it as I am usually able to be understood but I still struggle with some aspects of English (sentence structure as an example). There are some grammatical mistakes in my story that are present due to some of my struggles with English as an additional language and that Chinese and English languages have very different structures.
Also, sounds differ when spoken by different individuals while writing or scripted text can serve as a standardized information carrier that will not differ person to person. As stated in the Handbook of Research on Writing (Schmandt-Besserat. 2009), information in written form offer a second chance for it to be re-examine.
In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
Oral storytelling and written storytelling have different expectations for the roles of reader, writer, speaker and listener. Generally, in oral storytelling, the storyteller is granted more leeway for informality and listeners are generally more focused on engagement. I personally notice this when I interact with native English speakers, as they are usually hesitant to correct my grammar or language mistakes unless I specifically ask for it. As long as I’m able to be understood, then it’s okay.
In written stories, there is a lot more analysis and less leeway for mistakes. Mistakes are more noticable and readers generally have more time to interact with the text.
As what has been mentioned by Gnanadesikan (2011) in The Writing Revolution, the nature of writing requires it to be more accurate, and “done deliberately than speaking” (p.5), also writing has a higher requirement on literacy and education level than speaking. In my province, fold songs are a big feature of our local people, however, a lot of the songs sang in local dialects can only be passed down mouth by mouth because they do not have their own characters or the characters we have now do not cover the sounds they make. But that doesn’t affect their daily conversations or singing abilities. Again, like what Gnanadesikan has pointed out, speaking and listening are the two easier skills to master.
From a reader’s perspective, one will be more critical about writing from not just the lens of engagement but the lens of language usage. It may be poor or incorrect usage or it may just be a suggestion of a synonym that would fit better in a particular spot or a better way of wording it. The foreign teachers I work with much more readily offer advice and suggestions on how to fix my written work and stories than they do when I am speaking. As English is not my first language. I am granted more exceptions when I am speaking but generally feel that I am still expected to type/write at the same level of a first-language speaker and while I could make the same mistakes in my speaking, they will be judged more harshly in writing.
Written stories also provide the opportunity to offer visuals and pictures to enhance the story and the reader is provided opportunities to engage with the story multiple times and through different lenses if they wish to do so. Though the different Podcast websites and Apps offer that as well, it is not the same when a story is told with different voices and tones. And the feelings used by the speaker can affect the feelings of the receiver. In that case, they would feel more intimate when listening to stories instead of reading where you can only create all of the scenes and feelings by your own imaginations.
The different reads of the stories can be immediate or years apart. With an oral story, the listener can only re-interact with the story through memory recollection or by finding the initial storyteller and having them tell the story again. Even the memory of the story teller could differ so it is unlikely the story will be told exactly the same way twice. This makes it all the more impressive when you consider the oral traditions of Indigenous groups and how their stories were expected to be handed down verbatim.
If people are not trained to always tell stories, or learn the techniques purposely. It is very likely that oral storytelling will use easier and more repetitive sentence structures and words and make more grammatical mistakes. It is normal to people who speaks English as their first language as well, because when we talk and try to keep the cohesiveness of the process, we tend to focus on trying to describe the image or split out the information as quickly as possible so that sometimes our brain will omit the parts like grammar and sentences structure.
References:
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011). The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet. John Wiley & Sons.
Schmandt-Besserat, D., & Erard, M. (2008). Origins and forms of writing. Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text, 7-22.
Just some other comments.
Here I mainly want to argue a different perspective or simply sharing my understanding of Chinese compares to the last paragraph (p.18) that introduce Chinese in the Origins and Forms of Writing (Schmandt-Besserat, 2008).
Excerpt: “Because Chinese characters are written with elaborated series of pen strokes, and because Chinese calligraphy is done with brushes and ink, the characters have been considered small pictures that represent ideas. This is not the case, and numerous books have been devoted to dispelling this myth (DeFrancis, 1984)”.
I would argue, THIS IS THE CASE. And the reason why it is considered as small pictures of ideas not because they are written with pen strokes but because they are. The ideas of the morphemes in languages also applies to Chinese. If “girl” is the morpheme for words like “girlish” and “girlhood”, then there are set of morphemes that represents the meaning or ideas for different Chinese characters.
Take a look at some examples (sorry for the resolution of the picture):
In the first row, the left side is the word’s current form and the ones in the brackets are their ancient forms. They are “sun, moon, mountain, water and nest”.
Starting from the 3rd row, the picture introduce us different times of the days and their relative locations to the sun.
means “dawn”, the sun is raising up and passing the horizon.
means “morning, specially early morning”. The sun looks like it is in between grasses and the moon is still in the sky.
means “morning”, from where we can see that the sun has passed the top of the trees.
means “dusk”, where the sun has fall under, human feel like we can pitch it with our hands.
means “distant and out of sight” when the sun falls under the tree and nothing can be seen.
The writer got the next part correct by saying, “Most characters do represent speech sounds; 90% of the characters consist of a graphic element that indicates pronunciation, combined with anther element that marks meaning” (Schmandt-Besserat, 2008, p.18). The part that determines the meaning or at least what the word is relate to is mainly the hieroglyphs we have inherited from our ancestors and then combine that with other phonograms to make up the Chinese characters we know today and sometimes it is the other way around.
For example, characters with this radical “火
” more or less all relate to fire or flames. And the right side of the character mainly contributes to the pronunciation.
In conclusion, I am not try to categorize the Chinese language. And it is true that when you look at a Chinese character you might not know how to say it, but if you start learning the simply morphemes in Chinese, you will soon be able to know what property the character relates to. And if you study ancient Chinese characters you will need they have more resemblance to real life scenes, which I would call it a small picture items and ideas.
References:
苏培成. (2001). 汉字的性质. 廊坊师范学院学报, 17(1), 8-14.
王智杰. (2005). 关于汉字和语素——兼谈语素 “素”. 内蒙古民族大学学报: 社会科学版, 31(6), 35-37.