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Author Topic: Translation assistance  (Read 5273 times)

Offline brittk

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Translation assistance
« on: July 30, 2018, 08:08:30 PM »
Hello,
I am hoping someone can help me to translate the word 'courage' into its phonetic spelling. I have come across a few different versions: the most common appears to be "kʌrɪdʒ" but I have also come across "kʌɹɪdʒ"

Assistance would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks :)
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Offline Daniel

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Re: Translation assistance
« Reply #1 on: July 30, 2018, 02:12:55 PM »
It depends on the specific dialect/accent, but what you have seems close enough.

If this is for an assignment, and it looks like it might be, then (1) you shouldn't ask about homework on the internet; and (2) follow the specific instructions and style provided by your instructor.

By the way, the term for this would be transcription (changing to a different writing system, including phonetic transcription), rather than translation (changing to a different language).
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Offline panini

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Re: Translation assistance
« Reply #2 on: July 30, 2018, 10:14:53 PM »
If this is an assignment, the instructor really ought to provide you with a recording that you are supposed to transcribe. (1) Not everybody is actually a native speaker of English, so you can't be expected to know how the word is pronounced. I suppose it would be okay to require a student to submit a recording of their pronunciation, so the instructor can decide if it matches what you turn in. (2) Even if you do speak English, only the first and last segments are near-universal for English (although...tʃ does occur a non-trivial number of times).

However, the choice of [r] as opposed to [ɹ] or [ɾ] is pretty regional -- non-white South African English is the only dialect that I know of that does that. 
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Offline Daniel

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Re: Translation assistance
« Reply #3 on: July 31, 2018, 01:12:35 AM »
Quote
However, the choice of [r] as opposed to [ɹ] or [ɾ] is pretty regional -- non-white South African English is the only dialect that I know of that does that. 
Right,* but more importantly, there is a lot of inconsistency in the level of detail required in assignments (or used in publications), so that often <r> is the symbol representing the phoneme "/r/", which is actually pronounced [ɹ]. Bad practice, but convenient to type, and the "difference" in significance really depends on context.

*Some Scottish and a few other dialects may also sometimes have this, as well as non-native pronunciations which aren't inherently invalid for descriptive work.
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