- What does "BOLD" stand for?
BOLD stands for Basic Oral Language Documentation, a simple method for collecting, transcribing, and translating oral discourse, which can be performed by people who have no specialised linguistics training. It generates an audio and written record of a language which will be accessible and interpretable even if the language ceases to be spoken.
- What is language documentation?
Language documentation consists of comprehensive primary records for a language, including texts and wordlists. Documentation may exist in a variety of media, including video, audio, and written. Documentation supports a variety of activities including language development, language teaching, linguistic research, cultural studies, etc. - Why create language documentation?
Language is the chief manifestation of human intelligence, a central aspect of individual and group identity, and the means by which culture and knowledge are transmitted. As traditional cultures intersect with modern society, many domains of language use, and many whole languages, are being lost. Fortunately, inexpensive technologies for recording and storing spoken language have arrived before the extinction of the bulk of the world's linguistic diversity.
- What is oral discourse?
Oral discourse is any form of language usage involving one or more speakers. Examples include narrative, dialogue, singing, oratory, language play, and drama. The oral form of any language is considered primary: it is the what everyone learns first; for many languages no standard written form will ever exist. It is relatively easy to record a large quantity of oral discourse, but harder to get a diverse collection, and harder still to transcribe it.
- Aren't linguists already doing this work?
Every year, dozens of new research projects are funded in which professional linguists spend 3-5 years collecting and analyzing languages, and produce grammars and dictionaries. However, there is not enough sponsorship, or suitably qualified linguists, to do this work on the required scale. Instead, native speakers can do much of the collection work themselves: they can access the speech community with minimal expense; they are already trusted members of the community and can be relied upon to act in culturally appropriate ways; and they can work directly with monolingual speakers who may be the most reliable source of information about the language.
- How is this project funded?
The central premise of this project is that language documentation is an urgent task, and should not be held up while funding is obtained for each language. Can volunteers be found, and equipment be donated, so that the work can begin immediately? An important consequence is that language workers can tell members of their speech community that they do not profit financially when someone agrees to be recorded, and can legitimately decline requests to share such profits. The only people who participate are those who support the goals of the project.
- How much time is required?
Language workers are asked to contribute a total of one week of effort (40 hours) over the course of a year. This time consists of training (10 hours), audio capture (10 hours), oral annotation (10 hours), and transcription (10 hours). We assume that the language worker will already have plans to visit the speech community (e.g. during term break), and to visit a range of people in the community (e.g. seeing friends and relatives), and so this time is not factored into the week's total. - How are languages chosen for inclusion in the project?
The languages covered by this project are the mother tongues of the participants, who are university students and language workers who speak at least one indigenous language of PNG (including creoles). In some cases, two or more people may be working with the same language; they will work independently to collect oral discourse, but may collaborate in the later stages. - Do participants have to pay? Are they paid?
Participation in the workshop is free, however participants are expected to attend all sessions, and to contribute a week of time during 2010 for project work. The recorders have been donated to the participating universities by Olympus, and there is no cost for borrowing them. No funds are available for participants; instead they are expected to have independent motivation for preserving their tokples (e.g. language development, university studies).
- Who owns the recordings collected by the project?
Unfortunately there is no simple answer to this question. However, it is easy to improve on the existing practice where an expatriate arrives in a speech community, decides what to
record, and where and when to record it, and takes the materials away. We will adopt the position that the recorded materials belong to the speech community, and that consent to use the recordings (and the transcriptions and translations derived from them) for research and educational purposes, and to store them in institutional archives, is given by community leaders and by the individuals whose stories are told and whose speech is recorded. In relaying the oral discourse from the speech community to the archive, the language worker is providing a service to the speech community. Thus, the focus is not on ownership, but on stewardship and access.
- Who owns the transcriptions and translations generated by the project?
The language workers give their time and expertise in transcribing and translating a selection of the oral discourse collected in the project. We will adopt the position that these secondary materials belong to them, and that they give consent to the materials being used for research and educational purposes, and being stored in institutional archives. - Is there any archival value in compressed audio, collected in a noisy environment by a non-linguist?
In an ideal world, everyone would have access to professional
recording equipment, a quiet recording environment, and suitable
training in recording techniques. This project does not limit the possibilities for others to continue doing such work. However, the use of inexpensive equipment permits the work to be scaled up, and put in the hands of native speakers, who may obtain a much larger quantity of more naturalistic materials than an expatriate field linguist would be able to collect. If, at some future date, the language is no longer spoken, then a collection of oral discourse with transcriptions and translation is irreplaceable, even if it was stored in a compressed (lossy) audio format. We cannot underestimate the potential for yet-to-be-uninvented methods for enhancing the signal and interpreting its content. Even if the language is vital, much cultural knowledge is known only to the oldest members of the community. This too has inestimable value to future generations wanting a deeper understanding of their heritage.
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