It is possible to import CHAT files (used in e.g. the Childes project) in ELAN:
Select
Select the Chat file
Click on
Some remarks about this import feature:
supported are old CHAT files and CHAT-UTF8, not XML CHAT
existing media alignment in %snd tiers is maintained in ELAN:
when no media alignment is present at all, each CHAT utterance gets a default interval of 1 second assigned
when partial media alignment is present, the time interval is equally distributed over preceding unaligned utterances
overlapping utterances of the same participant are corrected as good as possible
CHAT dependent tier names are mapped to ELAN Tier Types
ELAN tier names are either CHAT participant labels or CHAT tier names, followed by '@participantName'
Remaining issues:
'<' and '>' characters in CHAT cause parsing errors when the imported file is saved as EAF file