Talking in Bangla, writing in English: Challenges of Translating interview data to foreign language and its significance for knowledge construction

“Reading is already translation, and translation is translation for the second time… The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.”

– H. G. Gadamer

 

The first time I used interview data for an academic assignment was as an undergraduate student in Bangladesh. Translating data collected in Bangla for my assignment in English was a simple, straightforward matter. As a native Bangla speaker fluent in English, I was in a comparatively good position to deal with the implications of language hierarchies. I never gave a second thought to what translation can mean for a researcher and her ethical responsibility towards knowledge construction.

The first time I shared my pilot interview data with my PhD supervisors, I encountered the challenges of language differences in a whole new light. Till then, I was used to presenting research conducted in a Deshi (native) context to a Deshi audience. Because such audiences were familiar with cultural expressions,  they understood the tacit expressions of the interlocutors even if the data were translated, making it easier for the researcher to present the findings. Because native researchers do not have to traverse linguistic and cultural barriers, native research has more potential to obtain deeper analysis.

In the case of my PhD, even though participants and me had the same non-English native language; the non-English data will lead to an English manuscript which will be presented to a foreign audience of my supervisors and examiners who do not speak a word of Bangla. I realised that unless I broke down every quote to explain the contexts, the coded emotions and cultural insinuations, the participants’ voices were susceptible to getting lost in translation. I had to ensure that my translation of data provided an accurate conversion in terms of interpretations, register, ethics, and matching of social characteristics.

Language is used to express meaning, but also influences how meaning is constructed. Translation matters because it affects knowledge production by capturing the subjective lived experiences. As I started coding my data with thematic analysis, I understood what Spivak meant by saying translation is not a matter of synonym, syntax or local taste. As a translator, I had to make decisions about the cultural meanings which language carries, and to evaluate the degree to which the two different worlds they inhibit are ‘the same’.  A major difficulty in translating research data to a different language is gaining conceptual equivalence or comparability of meaning. My interpreter’s dilemma was solved in a myriad of ways. For example,  while translating certain phrases and idioms with cultural undertones, or expressions of feelings, I had to bear in mind that literal translation would be an injustice if I wanted to duly represent the meaning  the interviewee was conveying. Hence, when someone said ‘Law is a bajey jinish’, I decided to translate it as ‘vicious thing’, something to be shunned or avoided, as opposed to ‘bogus, bad or worthless’ which would have been the literal English translations. Or when someone said ‘people don’t follow law because their manoshikota is like that’ I translated it as disposition as opposed to mentality. Again, sometimes my participants would fumble, speak in broken sentences, or struggled to express themselves coherently when asked for their opinions on gender issues. In those cases, I translated the responses  word-by-word to ‘make my  readers understand their mentality better’. For example, talking about child marriage, one respondent remarked she didn’t support child marriage. When I asked how she would ensure her child would not be married off, she then said ‘how can I protect them? I have told them to inform me whenever they are attracted to someone, that’s how I behave with them!’ This incoherence of response is not an evidence of indifference to following the law, but of the helplessness underprivileged women experience in Bangladeshi society.

It is significant to note how the promise of translation helped convince some of the interviewees to speak to me. While they were initially critical of my questions about their lived experiences of law, when I explained that I was not a journalist and that the findings would not be published in any newspapers in Bangladesh but will be submitted in English to some bideshi (foreign) professors, they were more comfortable in opening up. The foreign audience, removed from the sociopolitical landscape of the state and the government, seemed to them a form of security.

This translation exercise has transformed me as a researcher. I have rediscovered myself as a native, global South researcher whose ethical and methodological considerations affected a widely-used research method in the field of legal consciousness . This experience also enabled me to eventually ‘reinterrogate, re-interpret, and reposition’ the world of legal consciousness research.