100 Questions/15
Translated by Mandana Karimi
2026-02-03
We asked several researchers and activists in the field of oral history to express their views on oral history questions. The names of each participant are listed at the beginning of their answers, and the text of all answers will be published on this portal by the end of the week. The goal of this project is to open new doors to an issue and promote scientific discussions in the field of oral history.
In this project, a question is asked every Saturday, and we ask experts to present their views in the form of a short text (about 100 words) by the end of the week. All answers will be published together so that the audience can compare and analyze the views.
The content is the opinions of the senders and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Oral History website. Although the answers are supposed to be based on about 100 words, in order to be polite and not to leave the discussion incomplete, in some cases, answers longer than this are also accepted.
We asked the experts to submit their answers by Sunday night so that all answers can be published on Tuesday.
Question 15:
What is the boundary of correct editing in oral history works?
Gholamreza Azari Khakestar
The most important principle in editing oral history texts is to pay attention to several basic principles. First, the tone and expression of the narrator should be preserved; meaning that the compiler and editor should intervene in the text only to the extent necessary and to remove ambiguity, repetition, or linguistic inadequacies. Although many oral history interviews are unedited, incomplete, scattered, and sometimes contain dry narratives, this does not give permission for extensive interference with the narrator's speech. Editing these texts should be done with the aim of streamlining, coherence, and increasing readability, not changing the content. Second, the editing process should preserve the meaning, direction, and authenticity of the conversation and not cause any distortion or fundamental change in the historical narrative.
Mohammad Mehdi Abdollahzade
The transcribed text of the oral history interview will be archived without any changes. If a decision is made to publish it, while maintaining the narrator's tone and integrity, changes must be made to the text to make it readable, fluent, and fluent in accordance with standard written Persian; because in most cases, it is not easy to understand the transcribed text of the interview word for word. Some of the necessary changes are as follows: removing repetitions, insults, humiliation, curses, accusations of others, reliance on words, and materials whose publication would have family, legal, and social consequences; correcting spelling and grammatical errors; converting words, sentences, and colloquial expressions into standard Persian (with the exception of direct quotations); clarifying ambiguous matters for the audience in footnotes.
Hassan Beheshtipour
The interviewer and editor have the right to make formal edits, such as correcting repetitions, categorizing topics, and adjusting the narrative for clarity. They do not have the right to add personal interpretations, change semantic content, or remove important parts without the narrator’s knowledge and consent. The key is to respect the narrator’s moral rights: the original content, expression, and conclusion of the narrative should not be distorted. When editing, these questions can help us:
Does this change distort the narrator’s original voice? (e.g., tone of humor or sadness).
If the narrator sees this edit, will they accept it? (respect the narrator’s ownership of the memory).
Can the audience understand where the original text has been changed? (respect transparency).
Is this edit for clarity or for the ultimate change that I believe in? (difference between clarification and imposition).
Abolfat’h Mo’men
There are two types of editing in oral history: Technical (general) editing includes standardizing the script, lists, documents, and a short introduction about the interview. Content editing is done according to the style of the interview (conversational, academic) so that the narrator's speech remains visible. Linguistic shortcomings should be corrected, ambiguities should be clarified with subtitles and in coordination with the narrator, and repetitive or marginal material should be removed. Integrity, maintaining authenticity, and matching documents in footnotes are essential. Editing should create added value.
Shafigheh Niknafs
Oral history narratives have two meaning aspects:
1. The external meaning that focuses on the description of the historical event.
2. The internal meaning that is conveyed through non-verbal signs; such as the rise and fall of the voice, body language signs, silence, emotional and sentimental signs, deliberately expressing inverted realities, avoiding answering, etc. These signs are keys to further awareness and clues to interpreting the narrative. Therefore, in editing, importance should be given to maintaining the authenticity of speech and, as much as possible, non-verbal signs as well as the relationship between the interviewer and the narrator should be shown using linguistic editing signs. Changing the narrator's words in the interest of improving the text reduces its authenticity and credibility and increases its literary aspect. Therefore, it should be kept in mind whether the purpose of oral history is to produce a research document or fiction.
Gholamreza Azizi
The editing boundary for publishing oral history interviews varies according to the chosen method, with the proviso that the “information of the interviewee” should not be distorted in the editing. In “word-for-word” publishing, editing is recommended only at the level of contextual editing. At the second level (rewriting), the editor faithful to contextual and linguistic editing, observing the precedence and delay of time, rewrites the interview and identifies any changes in the text. At the third level (rearrangement), the editor, while editing contextually, linguistically and historically (faithful to the interview and historical division), also considers the subject as a secondary division. At the fourth level (contextual and literary-historical editing), the interview is completely rewritten, influenced by literature (novel writing, biography writing.) or with the help of historical sources.
Seyyed Mohammad Sadegh Feyz
Editing is the last stage of creating a book in the form of oral history. All the things that happen in editing a book are observed here as well, with the caveat that the speaker’s tone should be preserved above all else, so that the reader can distinguish between the text, footnotes, documents, and appendices when reading the work, and the text should be strictly avoided from approaching colloquialism and dialect. This point does not conflict with the previous point, but rather emphasizes that attention to standard language and even the beginning should be the criterion for the editor’s work. The subtlety of the editor’s work is to be able to combine the two well, so that the reader, when reading the work, is faced with both a literarily pure text and also feels the narrator in front of them while reading.
Hamid Ghazvini
Every writing requires literary and content editing to better convey concepts and better study it by the audience. In oral history, the final text of the interviewee's narrative of the past is based on questions raised by their experience, observation, and perception, and is presented in the form of the narrator's literature and tone on a background of their feelings and emotions. Accordingly, the narrator's literature and tone in oral history have historical authenticity, and the final text should not be far from it. That is, the boundary of editing in oral history should be considered the narrator's literature and tone, and any unnatural manipulation under the pretext of editing techniques or the editor's taste will damage it and discredit it.
Abolfazl Hassanabadi
It is difficult to provide a correct definition of editing in oral history works and its difference from other texts, because in oral history you are faced with a text converted from speech to writing, the most important factor in its presentation is the taste of the editor and the institution that publishes the work. In the meantime, it is difficult to choose standards that, while maintaining the nature and meaning of the original interview text, can also communicate with the audience. It seems that in the final editing of oral history books, by maintaining the standard language and paying attention to the taste of the readers, one should remain faithful to the content of the interview and the output should not be such that it makes it difficult to communicate with the original text.
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