Interview: Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut (Aug/1962) - transcriptions
In her article "Lost in Translation? Listening to the Hitchcock–Truffaut Interview", Janet Bergstrom suggested that the audio recordings of the Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut interviews should be transcribed, as they often differ from what actually appeared in Truffaut's book.
In general, the transcriptions made by the Hitchcock Wiki attempt to match the English parts of the interview, with the following caveats:
- occasionally Hitchcock, Truffat and translator Helen Scott spoke across each other without adding to the conversation and this is marked as "[crosstalk]"
- quick verbal corrections mostly ignore the words that the speaker was correcting — for example, Scott occasionally has to modify her translation of Truffaut
- Hitchcock occasionally has to repeat words to allow Scott time to translate and these repeatitions are generally not included
- audio dropouts in the recording are marked as "[tape dropout]" — if the missing words can be guessed confidently, they are included
- occasionally Hitchcock responded in French directly to Truffaut — if this is simply a repetition of words already spoken in English by Hitchcock, they are generally not transcribed
- occasionally Hitchcock understood Truffaut without the need for Scott to translate — in these instances, the statement is prefixed with "[FT]" to indicate that it is Truffaut speaking and not Helen Scott and only limited attempts have been made to transcribe the French words and phrases
- where it is unclear what is being said, entire words or phrases are replaced with "[???]" and dubiously transcribed words are appended with "[?]"
- where the meaning of a statement is unclear or ambiguous, additional information in square brackets is added to clarify the meaning
- if the speaker seems to be addressing a specific person, it is marked as "[to AH]", "[to FT]" or "[to HS]" to indicate Hitchcock, Truffaut or Scott respectively
- "——" is used to represent a speaker being interrupted or for when the speaker decides to change what they were initially going to say
- pauses in mid-sentence are generally not indicated, as Hitchcock often pauses to allow Scott to translate into French and Scott often begins translating Truffaut before he has finished his sentence — where they are included, they are shown as "..."
- in general, the transcripts attempt to follow the flow of dialogue whenever possible
