Reflections on language and research assistance

Conducting cross-cultural research with the use of translation may have several implications for the findings that researchers must be aware of, not the least if the aim of the research is to improve knowledge and understanding of experiences from a non-English speaking setting (Twinn, 1997). The lack of language competence implies substantial barriers in a research context. A lot of the details and the exact ways in which a message is phrased will simply not be grasped. For example when no equivalent word or expression exists in the target language and slightly different words are chosen in the presentation of the questions or in the translation of what the informant answered that may alter the meaning of the content. Also different cultural background may influence the way people communicate, for example by answering direct questions in a circumvent manner or use certain indirect or (to outsiders) unrelated words to explain a particular phenomenon. Intra-cultural disparities in language use, gestures and cultural norms when interviewing across gender, age, social class and religion, can be difficult to detect (Kvale, 2007, p. 68). Kvale (2007, p. 68) thus states that it is vital that the researcher spends enough time in the research field area in order to establish familiarization with the culture and learn verbal and non-verbal meanings of communication and acceptable conduct in an interview setting. When sufficient language competence is lacking an interpreter should be selected based on culturally acceptance and proficiency in the language. Using a non-professional as an interpreter may obviously have implications for the quality of the translation, especially if the interpreter has a particular agenda (Kvale, 2007, p. 68).

The use of different translators who interpret differently may reduce the reliability of the study (Twinn, 1997).

In the current study, substantial effort was invested into learning at least basic level Amharic, the language practiced in the study area. During a three months long language course, I learned how to read fairy simple texts in Amharic and to speak at a

very basic level. The health care providers at the hospital were all trained in English, and all patient information in the medical charts was written in English. The level of spoken English was good among residents and senior physicians, while it was at a very basic level among the majority of the nurses. As I was far from mastering the medical terminology in Amharic, I mainly communicated in English with the health care workers. In conversations of more social character among the nurses I attempted to communicate in Amharic. I moreover decided not to bring the research assistant with me on the ward when interacting with the nurses and the patients, as I believed this could disturb the interaction and distance myself from the nurses on the ward.

This clearly meant that I lost some of the content in the patient / health care provider interaction, as I had to rely on my own observations, my basic understanding of Amharic and the non-verbal communication taking place. Sometimes the health care personnel would explain the content of a particular conversation afterwards. My own conversation with the patients often developed into a deeper conversation from the women’s side, which I was not able to follow, and which meant that I lost potentially valuable information. However, some of these conversations were continued during interviews at a later stage.

During the interviews with the women at the hospital and in the communities, as well as with HEWs and local healers in the communities, I relied more heavily on my main research assistant. The main research assistant and I spent considerable time together revising the questions in the interview guides to decide on the suitable and equivalent Amharic wording and phrasing, so that she became familiar with the medical concepts and knew what terms would be appropriate to use in the conversation with the women. However, during the course of the interviews, her choice of wording changed according to how she perceived that the women best understood our questions.

During the course of the fieldwork, as my main research assistant allowed the informant to speak for longer periods of time and asked relevant follow-up questions herself, the women may have felt more relaxed in the conversation and shared more

details. Because of the main research assistant’s ability to remember long sequences of a story when the women spoke for long, I rarely felt there were large gaps or important issues that missed during the interview settings. However, the later revisions of the transcribed interviews certainly revealed that I missed certain details in the conversations.

The first transcriber and translator of the written material, who was situated in Addis Ababa, preferred to translate the Amharic into ‘proper sounding’ English sentences.

This appeared nice when reading the text, but after comparing the transcripts to the translated version, my main research assistant and I found that important cultural terms, loaded concepts and their meanings sometimes disappeared in the translation.

We experienced that there was a substantial distance between what was

communicated as the sentences were not literally translated. We thus revised these translated interviews to add the necessary clarifications.

Due to my language limitations, I am aware that the findings I present is to some extent the research assistant’s interpretations of the women’s words. There are always multiple layers of interpretation between how an informant has in fact experienced a phenomenon and how the readers of a produced text understand the phenomenon.

One cannot expect that we necessarily got the infinite and experienced “truth” from any of our informants, as what and how the informants chose to communicate to us may have been influenced by multiple factors, such as feelings of shame or the interest of presenting her situation in a better or worse manner than it actually was experienced. The translation taking place was furthermore influenced by how the translator herself interpreted what was told by the informant and how she

communicated that interpretation to me. My understanding of what was translated to me might also have been influenced by my own preconceptions or limited contextual and cultural understanding. How I perceived the interviews and the written data material clearly influenced the manner in which the data was coded and categorized, and later how I chose to construct the text and present the findings. There are however a number of factors that in the research process are likely to have reduced

substantial misinterpretations of the women’s stories, such as the long periods of time spent in the study field, conducting follow-up interviews and the use of triangulation.