Sign language text transcription and analyses using ‘Microsoft Excel’

This is a short explanation of how we have used the commercial software program ‘Microsoft Excel’ for transcriptions of Swiss German Sign Language monologues and conversations. Although the transcription is not directly linked to video, it has the advantage that various kinds of searches and correlations can be carried out on it, that the same basic transcript can be expanded or reduced to be used for different kinds of analyses, and that the analyses can be easily represented and printed out in different forms (charts, graphs, etc.).