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Verbatim records of police proceedings, customs and excise and immigration interviews are of coursealso kept. These reports have been increasingly contested and are the subject of analysis by forensiclinguists (Gibbons, 1994). The precarious nature of such reports is highlighted in instances wherebilingual speakers produce nonstandard oral narratives which, in turn, are then reproduced in astandard written form by the note-taker. This record is subsequently used to argue for the linguisticcompetence of the accused when his or her responses under interrogation appear to implicate themas guilty. Issues of transcription have also been discussed in the ethnographic research literature(Clifford, 1990; Atkinson, 1992). Clifford suggests the inevitable tension, in representing aninformant's own words, between authenticity and readability. Informants’words cannot be simplyreproduced on the page; they have to be represented through writing conventions which arethemselves matters of interpretation. Informants’speech is therefore written up in such a way as torepresent them through the eyes of the writer: “the representation of speech can be used to conveythe status and character of the speaker. The choice of conventions is thus a choice about therepresentation of persons as social and moral actors in the text” (Atkinson, 1992: 24). Although theseissues of representation have been discussed in the literature on research methods, they are rarelythe subject of open debate in the public domain.
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