The Transcriber-ELAN-Toolbox funride

[Andrew Margetts]

Dear Mark,

You might like to try an online  converter that I developed for this 
purpose. It converts any Transcriber file directly to a Toolbox text 
file such that this file can also be opened in ELAN. It is customisable 
to the extent that marker names can be changed (and saved) to suit your 
own preferences, and it can provide matching Toolbox 'database type' 
and  ELAN 'marker' files to assist in opening the text file in both 
programs.

Our habit is to open the converted file in Toolbox for further 
processing (e.g. interlinearisation), and then to import it into ELAN. 
But of course you can work it the other way around too (using ELAN's 
export to Toolbox capability) - the intention was to enable a completely 
flexible workflow.

The converter does preserve the speaker ID's, and can handle 
Transcriber-style split-speakers (writing the info to two separate 
consecutive records with the same timecode). It also extracts and 
rewrites the ELAN timecode information so that Toolbox can also play the 
sound chunks. It seems to work OK for quite a lot of people. You can 
find it here:

http://linguisticsoftwareconverters.zong.mine.nu/

(Excuse the grand title - I once had intentions to write some more 
converters but work intervened).

Andrew Margetts


Mark Post wrote:
>  Dear Listmembers,
>
> Coming back to ELAN after a long hiatus and installing the latest 
> version 3.9.1, I find that certain things have changed such that 
> Transcriber imports and Toolbox exports don't work as smoothly as they 
> used to, at least for me. Before I burden the list with specific 
> questions, can I ask whether anyone is currently successfully 
> importing .trs files into ELAN and, from ELAN, successfully exporting 
> the .txt to Toolbox for interlinearization? *And* preserving speaker 
> IDs in multi-party texts?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Mark
>