Scientific research, particularly in the social sciences, often involves conducting interviews to try and understand people’s behaviour and perceptions. It is not every day that a study involves interviewing the researchers themselves, but this is what a colleague of mine and I did during a European research project. I had sat during research meetings discussing how to conduct interviews for the project and the problem of which language to use immediately arose.
English looked like the easier option because there would be no need for translation. Still, we were not all convinced this would be fair to the people being interviewed, or even a good idea from a research point of view, so I decided to look into this more closely with Professor Alma Jahić Jašić, a colleague from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
When we interviewed the researchers, they revealed issues both when the interviews were carried out in English and when the first language of the interviewees was used instead. English was particularly problematic when interviewees struggled to express themselves:
“At times they couldn’t come up with the English words, so they would say it in [the first language] and I would translate it, or they would use some English expression that … I wasn’t sure what they meant, and I would try to clarify with my own words, and I had to confirm that what they were saying was basically… what I understood.”
Could they be sure that the information they were getting from the interview was accurate enough? Was the interview making the person feel unnecessarily inadequate?
Translators needed a clear understanding of context, otherwise the interview content could be misrepresented
Researchers who used their interviewees’ first language instead gave us insights that revealed problems when the interviews were being translated, and later when their research was being published. Translators needed a clear understanding of context, otherwise the interview content could be misrepresented:
“It’s difficult to guarantee that the meaning has been respected by someone who is not part of the research… and that’s an ethical issue.”
A subtler problem was the deculturalisation of the data that took place as a result of a tendency to avoid culturally-specific examples when writing up the research:
“You need to also contextualise the translation itself so it’s very, very difficult, and I think it does affect the way you select excerpts to include, because there could be some really good excerpts but you think ‘ooo this is difficult to convey in a good way, so I’m going to find something else’.”
Researchers also often found they were under pressure not to include their examples in the original language:
“I remember some time ago… we offered the original quotation in the language in which [the interview] was recorded, and more and more this has been disappearing.”
The researchers’ perceptions indicated that what had originally been culturally rich information given by their interviewees had become neutralised at publication stage to the extent that one researcher remarked on the need to “[give] prominence to the other language and just to the idea that ‘well, this language was there’.”
And therein lies the researcher’s dilemma – a not-so-straightforward language choice.
Natalie Schembri is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology at the University of Malta and coordinator of the Academic English Programme. The original article on which this write-up was based can be found at https://doi.org/10.1177/17470161221085857.
Did you know?
• The earliest New Year festivities date back to about 4,000 years ago when the people of ancient Babylon began their new year in what we now call March.
• This celebration began with the new moon after the spring equinox.
• The Gregorian calendar was introduced in October of 1582 after Pope Gregory XIII revised the Julian calendar.
• The name January comes from the Roman god Janus, portrayed with one face looking forward and one looking back.
For more trivia, see: www.um.edu.mt/think.
Sound Bites
• Researchers developed a transistor that simultaneously processes and stores information like the human brain. This transistor goes beyond categorisation tasks to perform associative learning. It identifies similar patterns, even when given imperfect input. While previous similar devices could only operate at cryogenic temperatures, the new transistor operates at room temperature, making it more practical.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/12/231221012738.htm
• Blue light from LED lamps and consumer electronics can mess with your sleep because it disrupts production of the natural sleep hormone melatonin. Tinted glasses or displays in night mode can mask, but don’t remove, a portion of the disruptive wavelengths. But now, researchers report that they have designed more ‘human-centric’ LEDs that could potentially enhance drowsiness or alertness on command.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/12/231214132513.htm
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Photo of the week
.This new image of NGC 2264, also known as the ‘Christmas Tree Cluster’, shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the glow of stellar lights. NGC 2264 is, in fact, a cluster of young stars – with ages between about one and five million years old – in our Milky Way, about 2,500 light-years away from Earth. Photo: https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/ telescopes-illuminate-christmas-tree-cluster/