Interview language

In the final part of this section I would like to discuss the question of interview language, since this also had an important bearing on the nature of the comments made by my interviewees and on my interpretation of them. I carried out most of the interviews myself in English, and five others were conducted in Mandarin Chinese by a visiting colleague. Although the Chinese interviews had not been part of my original research design, I was delighted to have the opportunity to gather some data in the students‟ first language, particularly as I was conscious of the challenges presented to my interviewees by being required to talk about complex topics in a foreign language.

I subsequently came across the article by Cortazzi, Pilcher and Jin (2011), who examine a wide range of published research on Chinese Learners, including several cited in my literature review. The authors note that relatively few researchers explicitly acknowledge language choice as an important issue in their interviews, despite the fact that there is a significant qualitative effect of

language choice both on the information given by participants and on the interpretation made by the researcher, as they demonstrate by comparing transcripts from “blind shadow” interviews in which participants are interviewed in their first language and then in that of the researchers. The authors note some significant differences including expressive ability in the language of the interview, extra time needed for interviews in a foreign language and a number of characteristics of Chinese face-to-face communication processes such as indirectness and a listening stance in relation to superiors, including academic interviewers (Cortazzi et al., 2011:519). These authors strongly recommend reflecting on the implications of interview language choice at the design stage as well as acknowledging the qualitative differences between data gathered through interviews held in the first and second languages of participants.

Regarding interpretation, Cortazzi et al. (2011) mention the role of the translator, who becomes an unwitting producer of data since all translation involves some degree of interpretation. Although I had not intended to compare the data quality of our English and Chinese interviews, the transcripts of the Chinese interviews generally reveal more precise vocabulary to discuss abstract concepts and longer responses to the interviewer‟s questions. On closer inspection, it is not always clear whether these differences are the product of the interviewees‟ speech or the skill of the translator. In either case, the process of transcription became enmeshed with the process of translation, and this made me acutely aware of the extent to which my colleague and I were involved not just in translation, but in meaning-making on behalf of our participants, as can be seen in the following excerpts from our email correspondence.

Transcriber’s first version: “I know two Chinese and two European students live in same house, they seldom have communications with each other”

Corrected first version: “I know two Chinese and two European students who live in the same house, but they seldom communicate with each other.”

Transcriber’s note on corrected first version: “Here the interviewee gives an example instead of meaning he really knows all of them.”

Transcriber’s second version: “I know two Chinese students who live with two European students, but they seldom communicate with each other.”

Principal researcher’s note on second version: “As the student is only talking about an example, I have changed this to make the hypothetical nature of the sentence clearer.” Corrected second version: I know that even if two Chinese and two European students live in the same house, they might seldom communicate with each other.”

involved sending comments and re-translations between China and the UK, as I would comment on initial translations, and propose corrections, which sometimes improved the original translation and sometimes missed the point. In the above case, I corrected an interview transcript for grammatical and stylistic features and these corrections were noted. My colleague then sent me a second translation with a note as to the real meaning of the utterance, which I had misunderstood. My “correction” had not captured the hypothetical nature of the student‟s utterance, which was not obvious to me in the first version. Finally the re-translation was corrected to bring out this important syntactical feature in English. This example aptly demonstrates the way in which data were not only jointly produced by the participant and the interviewer, but in a very palpable sense they were also the product of a protracted negotiation process between the translator/transcriber (my Chinese colleague) and the principal researcher (myself). The two examples given in Appendix 2 show how this negotiation process also included the interviewees, who were subsequently invited to check the transcription summaries.

Several authors note that researchers are always involved in some degree of interpretation, since as Kvale (2007: 93) puts it: “From a linguistic perspective, the transcriptions are translations from an oral language to a written language, where the constructions on the way involve a series of judgements and decisions”. Temple, Edwards and Alexander (2006) appear to agree with this viewpoint, and state that literal translation just adds another layer of transformation:

“All researchers are translators and interpreters in their analyses and presentations of their interviewees' experiences and perspectives, even where they share a language. Literal translation, from one language to another, in research makes this process acutely visible, however”. (Temple, Edwards and Alexander, 2006: 7)

The purpose of this section has been to acknowledge the differences between translated and first language data in the spirit of Cortazzi et al.‟s (2011) recommendations. It has also shown that during the writing of transcripts I came to recognise the way in which translator and researcher are both involved in the

co-creation of meaning through the acts of transcription and translation. In this way I have again attempted to foreground the social constructionist philosophical perspective of this thesis by locating myself and my colleague within the data gathering process in order to highlight the significant role of the researcher in co-creating research data.