DATA COLLECTION AND PROCESSING

For both instances of fieldwork, data were recorded on video. These recordings were translated, where necessary, and then transcribed. The researchers who assisted in conducting, recording, transcribing and translating the interviews all had what Miles and Huberman (1994) refer to as ‘markers’ of good qualitative researchers-as- instrument which are 1) familiarity with the phenomenon being studied, 2) strong conceptual interest, 3) a multidisciplinary approach, as opposed to a narrow grounding or focus in a single discipline, and 4) good ‘investigative’ skills, including doggedness, the ability to “raw people out”, and the ability to ward off premature closure. The fieldworkers who assisted with the first phase of interviews were senior students in the faculty of education and who were fluent in isiZulu and together agreed on a final consensual, version of the text. The fieldworker who conducted the second phase of interviews was a B.Ed. Honours student in the faculty of education and conducted research in the South Africa Research Chair (SARChI) in the Centre for Education Practice Research on the Soweto campus. He is fluent in isiZulu and familiar with the phenomenon being studied. His translations were back-translated to firm up the reliability of the process of data collection (Henning et al. 2018).

The involvement of translators in qualitative research presents unique challenges for ensuring the trustworthiness of the generated data. Temple and Young

(2004) ask three pertinent questions about translation in qualitative research: 1) Does it matter whether the act of translation is identified? 2) Does it matter whether the identity of the translator and the researcher are the same? 3) How far into the analysis of the data should a researcher involve a translator? All three these questions are important issues to consider during the design of the study; to ensure that accurate data can be generated, attention to translation issues is crucial (Van de Vijver & Poortinga 2004; Henning et al. 2018). Not being a speaker of isiZulu myself, inhibited my interaction with the participants of the study. I decided that for the reliability (and the trustworthiness of the results) of the inquiry, the children would be best accommodated in their primary language, with ample opportunity to code-switch to English. To compensate for that I selected reliable and competent fieldworkers who are known for their research assistantships in the research centre. Ketso3_{, who was} the main fieldworker and who also assisted with translation, is currently a lecturer in education at the university and has had ample experience as a fieldworker in various studies at the university and at the Department of Basic Education (Kotze, Fleisch & Taylor 2018).

Temple and Young (2004) and Henning, Van Rensburg and Smit (2004) argue that one also has to consider the epistemological position of the researcher: On a spectrum, varying from researchers being seen as ‘objective’ instruments of research who want to reduce bias as much as possible, on the one end, and viewing researchers as interpretive and constructionist on the other, has implications for translation of data (Van der Vijver & Poortinga 2004; Herholdt 2017; Henning et al. 2018). The production of knowledge is, according to these and other social science scholars (Henning et al. 2004), influenced by the researcher’s position within the social reality of the inquiry. This ‘social reality’ view acknowledges that the translator becomes part of the knowledge production activity. This has been evident in the study and was taken into account in the planning. Ketso would thus, ultimately, be more than a technical translator – he would be an instrument of linguistic representation and thus contribute to meaning in a pragmatical linguistic manner (Halliday 2004; Halliday & Matthiessen 2013). The knowledge that the translator contributed to the generation of data would not have been possible if he had been excluded from the study itself. An external translator, who did not have the social experience of being present in the data

collection could have distorted the data by a decontextualised translator. The importance and role of the translator in social science research is adequately summarised by Simon (1997:137) as follows:

The solutions to many of the translator’s dilemmas are not to be found in dictionaries, but rather in an understanding of the way language is tied to local realities, to literary forms and to changing identities. Translators must constantly make decisions about the cultural meanings which language carries, and evaluate the degree to which the two different worlds they inhibit are ‘the same’. These are not technical difficulties, they are not the domain of specialists in obscure or quaint vocabularies…. In fact the process of meaning transfer has less to do with finding the cultural inscription of a term than in reconstructing its value.

This view provided a guideline in selecting a suitable translator for my study; I needed an individual translator that would be able to represent the meaning expressed by the participants of the study in such a way that it could be back-translated and verified by the teachers of the children. The challenge of the view of the researcher being an ‘objective’ instrument of research is that, in an attempt to reduce bias, utterances are translated and transcribed literally, risking the loss of the value of the utterances. In reading such transcripts, readers produce their own understanding of the text, based on their own assumptions, feelings and values that inherently increase the bias, due to the absence of contextual validity of the translation. I argue that, utilising the services of a translator within the knowledge production process has been beneficial to this study, because he has knowledge of the content and the context of the study. His description of the participants’ utterances can, arguably, be more usable than the ‘accuracy’ of the translation of the participants’ utterances by an outsider who may not note the underlying cues.