Paradoxically, intangible heritage made up of (audio-/video) recorded testimony is often accessed through its written transcript. The importance of the stage of transcription is what we would like to focus on here. Drawing from thirteen Acadian and Laurentian French corpora, we aim to demonstrate that a transcript is not the faithful rendering of a segment of reality but a construct. This construct, both more or less impoverished and sometimes supplemented, results from a chain of motivated choices and resolution of problems which may have a far-reaching impact upon the interpretative work of the researcher.