Folklore final paper

Folk Tale Transcription and Analysis

Towards this assignment, I had an interview in my apartment lounge with my friend Hengzhen Zhang who is also attending this class. Hengzhen is my first person met at this school, and both of us are from China. He usually tells me some philosophical stories to enlighten me, such as when I am in a bad mood, he will tell some inspiring stories. The reason why I chose him to collect the tale is that he has a 6-year-old sister, so he's very good at telling stories. He always tells his sister stories before the time goes to bed, and his little sister always enjoys listening to him telling stories. It made me wonder what makes his storytelling so compelling and magical. Most of the stories he talked are from storybooks, such as Grimm's Fairy Tales. Therefore, in my mind, his narration style is generally more impressive and dynamic.

As he told me the story Stone Soup, he would often draw clues from my reaction to interact with me. Specifically, he would stop to check my reaction and make sure I was keeping up with him. Even though my age is quite different from his sister's, I still found a lot of fun and drama in the story by his storytelling. The story he told me this time was something he heard on YouTube, and he told it in the way like he would tell this story to his sister. Thus, listening to the story from Hengzhen, I felt like I have traveled through time more than ten years ago when my parents told me a heart-warming bedtime story.

My transcription method is to record all his words as precise as possible, including some pauses, the sound level, and speed of his speech. Since the story was told in English, he told the story with the words that aren't particularly hard to understand. For the obvious pause caused by forgetting the words, I ignored it in the process of transcription, because I did not want to bring more things to the story that did not belong to its original version. However, for the pauses that are needed for the storyline, I added the word pause to my transcription. Also, there were lots of pauses before moving on to the next scene. For some tones, like sighing, I noted it as well. In addition, for some of the expressions in the story, such as giggling, I also emphasized them in the transcription. Besides, a lot of mimics sounds of the original video was created, like voice to fine and quitely, which the most important thing of telling the story. He spoke by his own style full of emotion This interview was conducted in a quiet environment without other people's interruptions, which also made me more focused on the story.

The story Stone Soup is one of the folk tales from Europe. The main idea of the story is to let audiences know the importance of sharing. The story was obviously told to children, so the term folk group refers to the children of Europe, even the whole world. There are many versions of this story, such as Hungarian, Russian, and French. As we learned in the class, this story belongs to Verbal Folklore.

In the process of this interview, I learned to respect children’s culture and consider speaker’s feelings when speaking. In Chapter 4 of McNeill's Folklore Rule, he proposes a view of the children's folk group. “An unfortunate result of this is that it's very easy for adults to feel that they completely understand children's culture, perhaps better than the children themselves do. This is an attitude that most people would never presume toward any other folk group.” (P78) In this interview, Hengzhen has grasped the childlike innocence of the children very well and displayed a complete story in the most childlike way. I learned to put myself in the situation without any bias. In fact, in the process of telling the story, Hengzhen has mimicked some sounds, for example, the sound knocking on the door, and closing the door, Hengzhen beat the table with his hand to show. I did not emphasize it specifically in my transcription, but I think it is very important because this is the sign of respecting the children’s world. Therefore, I may add it in the later stage. In addition, I appreciated his patience the most. He did not omit any details of the story even the repeated part of the conversation in the story.