Phonetic transcription - Definition and Overview

A phonetic transcription is a linguistic representation of an utterance using phonetic symbols, like the International Phonetic Alphabet.

There are two general types of phonetic transcription: broad transcription and narrow transcription. Broad transcription is usually just a transcriptions of the phonemes of an utterance, whereas narrow transcription encodes information about the phonetic variations of the specific allophones in the utterance.