Field Research Stuff 4: Language Issues (or Lost in Translation)

There is this one million dollar question for every researcher. Is it possible to conduct a research in a language that is not your mother tongue? Considering the fact that even if you are fluent in your research language, you need to accept that it is hard to understand every detail, read the cultural codes and understand the jokes. Language is not a pile of words, it is a pile of experience, past, culture, and the rest. However, I think everything depends to your research design.

• If your research design does not necessitate to have that much of fluency you are on the safe side. This means, your research doesn’t necessitate for you to understand the secret meanings, covered references, to read in-between lines and etc... If you are already fluent enough to conduct the research, good for you, go for it and yeahhh!!! This means if you will ask more straightforward questions and will spend time with your subjects to become a little more familiar with their cultural codes, references, wording and jokes... In any cases, I think it is good to support your findings with some other sources such as archival research or quantitative findings.
• If you are not very familiar with the language, opes you have a problem. And guess what: this is my case! I understand half of one language and 1/10^th of the other one that people speak in the country that I conduct my research. I should admit that it limits my research to a great extend. Still there are a couple of options:
• I conducted interviews in English with people who can understand and answer the questions. 
• I found native speakers who are willing to come to interviews with me to translate my questions and my interviewees answers to them. 
• I hired an assistant who established contacts for me, and sit with me during the interviews to help when needed. 
• Still it was a big pain in the a*s. It makes especially hard to establish the first connections with the interviewees. However, when you make friends or find assistants, things get a little easier. In any case, there can be people who questions the accurate of your research as you are not a native speaker. It is good to question yourselves and your works, and listen people who bring up critical issues to your attention. This will make you think about your own justifications, reasonings and will help you to protect your works against various criticisms, some meaningful ones as well as some nonsensical ones (warning: the academia is full of them).
• In my very humble opinion, there is a very dangerous outcome of over exaggerating this language issue. It takes us back to the time when each one was studying her own country or culture (of course except the native-English speakers whose knowledge have been considered as objective and above criticism). This is a different version of colonialism that tells you what to study, where to stand. Even if it is not good enough, I am up for trying new things, take the risk and learn the language. As I mentioned before, I strongly believe that we can make it work if we can design our research accordingly.
• Plus, I think the best time to try this is during the PhD. Afterwards, we will probably become more conservative and concerned with our abilities and positions.

To be continued...