 |
| World War I era poster in Yiddish to encourage food conservation. Caption (translated) "Food will win the war - You came here seeking freedom, now you must help to preserve it - Wheat is needed for the allies - waste nothing." Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons |
As social science researchers, we have to routinely work
across language barriers with our respondents.
It is highly likely that the native language of a researcher
(Urdu in my case) may be different from the respondents’. Great care is taken to
simplify questionnaires so that they can be translated into the local language with
minimal difficulty. The hiring of translators is also considered to be a high
priority task in the research process and their proficiency in the local
language is a deciding factor. Effective translation can play an important role
in mitigating the language barrier between a researcher and a respondent. For
this to happen, a translator should be well trained in the research process.
Some people might argue that it is not necessary to train translators, and that
their job is to simply ‘translate.’ But well trained translators not only understand
the value of questions in the overall research process, they also experiment
with different ways to get the respondent to understand the questions. The
ownership and motivation of translators arise only when they are fully immersed
into the research process. In my own involvement in the design and translation
of an anthropometric training for a LANSA study
on women’s work and nutrition in Sindh, I leveraged on my understanding of the
study while translating some key concepts to the participants.
