I do not believe that exact reproduction of people s speech is possible. All that we can do as researchers is attempt to reproduce the communicative events as closely as possible they will never be exact. Also, we cannot reproduce past events. We can only attempt to reconstruct life events and hope that there will be some degree of verisimilitude. As an analogy, there are qualitative and interpretive differences between being an actor in a play, watching the play, or reading the play.
Transcription is an interpretive practice.
A researcher s approach to transcription underscores her or his individual theoretical and epistemological assumptions about research. Transcribing discourse, like photographing reality, is an interpretive practice. Decisions about how to transcribe, like decisions about telling and listening, are theory driven and rhetorical. . . . Different transcription conventions lead to and support different interpretations and ideological positions, and they ultimately create different worlds. Meaning is constituted in very different ways with alternative transcriptions of the same stretch of talk.