Translating Lived Reality to “Academic Knowledge”: Epistemic Injustice in an Ethnographic Account of Sexual Consent in the Global South

My doctoral research uses ethnographic methods to explore whether and how the law should respond to breaches of conditional sexual consent. Conditional consent occurs where someone consents to sexual relations, but with conditions attached. These might be explicit e.g., using protection, or implicit e.g., a sexual partner misrepresenting oneself as a doctor when they are not one. Current approaches to conditional consent address it only in Global North jurisdictions. My research explores how conditional consent operates in the Global South instead, by conducting fieldwork in Delhi, India.

My fieldwork consisted of speaking to various stakeholders about, in the broadest terms, sexual consent and how it plays out on the ground. This post reflects on the things that get lost in translation when working across cultures and working in more than one language.

My doctoral fieldwork was entirely based in Delhi, where the commonly spoken languages are Hindi and English. However, having been schooled in English medium institutions right from primary school (reflecting my caste and class privilege), I have become accustomed to conducting most of my conversations in English, especially the difficult ones. Whilst fluent in Hindi, it can sometimes be somewhat foreign to me. Despite my fluency in both languages, fieldwork presented difficulties because of the ever-changing nature of language and the nuanced ways in which cultures and languages label phenomena differently. In the words of a practising commercial lawyer:

“Law gets amended and then a new law takes its place. This is what will also happen with the definition of consent – first we had the idea of mohabbat, then that changed into ishq, then we had the idea of aiyashi, then we evolved into the concept of boyfriend and girlfriend, then a relationship, and now we are using the language of fling and open marriage etc. So, humans are always evolving. The law also has to evolve! Consent is ever-changing and its definition will too, it’s not a patthar ki lakeer [line in the sand]. Behaviours and attitudes are ever-changing so the definition of consent will also change.”

Concepts get lost in translation. This interviewee used three different words, for which I have been unable to find direct translations into English. After consulting friends more fluent in Hindi than I, the best translations I have been able to come up with are love for mohabbat, love with passion for ishq, and hedonism for aiyashi. As a result, I used these words during transcription. Yet, the subtle differences between these three words are elemental to the point my interlocutor is making here. Surely, the nuance of her point would be better conveyed by retaining her original words? It is impossible for any act of translation to be entirely value neutral when different languages are at play? How then can I do full justice to my interviewees’ knowledge?

Moreover, her words in their original language, reflecting her lived experience, are not knowledge-producing, but my imperfect translation of them for academic audiences is. This is a prime example of epistemic injustice as coined by Miranda Fricker, which occurs when a subject is wronged in her capacity as a knower. One of the two types of epistemic injustice she identifies is hermeneutical injustice, defined as “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization.” My interviewee is hermeneutically marginalised by my very act of (imperfect) translation, which obscures her precise social experience from collective understanding due to my authorial influence on it. Even though it is her lived reality I am translating, it is my words that are knowledge-producing, simply because they will form part of an academic output, structured and formatted as a dissertation.

This is a common dilemma for some social scientists, especially feminists who try to mitigate against practices which marginalise. Various methodologies have evolved to counteract the tendency of the interpreter to silence, such as the use of narrative research or unstructured interviews. In fact, the desire to be led by the language of research participants is where grounded theory originated.

Yet, my fear of silencing my interlocutor’s voice remains. The epistemic implications of my translation of this knowledge troubles me, especially given that the translation cannot be devoid of authorial influence. Shouldn’t my interviewees be the ones fuelling the production of academic knowledge, instead of me, simply because I have the right academic credentials, which are themselves a consequence of my caste and class privilege?