Reconceptualizing the Link Between Validity and Translation in Qualitative Research: Extending the Conversation Beyond Equivalence

Abstract

Qualitative researchers often take for granted that the process of translation involves finding in the target language an equivalent linguistic expression to the one used in the source language. The validity of translation in qualitative research is thus based on the equivalence between the original and the translated texts, and correspondingly, uncertainty and differences between the two are treated as threats to validity and trustworthiness. Integrating insights from critical translational theories and Phil Carspecken’s critical reconstructive analysis, we demonstrate that a series of possible meanings always co-exists in the interpretation of a single speech act in both an original text and its translation. These nuanced meanings carry both foregrounded and backgrounded historical, inter-, and intra-cultural references. Through the application of critical reconstructive analyses to original and translated texts, we use examples to demonstrate an approach to achieve reflexivity and criticality through embracing, dialoguing about, and reflecting upon the uncertainty and difference in the meaning-making process of translation. Under this new approach, equivalence is not the sole criterion to evaluate the validity and trustworthiness of translation-related work in qualitative research; uncertainty and difference are not merely threats to the validity of qualitative research. We argue that, if addressed appropriately, uncertainty and difference can catalyze researchers’ interrogation of their own positionality as well as various forms of power dynamics, and thus enhance the validity of qualitative research.

Keywords

translation translator equivalence uncertainty meaning field critical reconstructive analysis cultural typification validity

Introduction

In an overview of the recent development in translation studies, Brian O’Keeffe (2019) notes

Translation studies hasn’t quite escaped the gravitational pull of equivalence...the journey of translation sets out toward a shimmering horizon of sameness, where the ideal of a perfect transfer of meaning is achieved, where nothing is lost in translation, where the translation clinches itself as an identical reproduction of the original text. (p. 230)

O’Keeffe’s metaphor likens a translator’s pursuit of equivalence, or in his words, orientation toward the “horizon of sameness,” to a planet’s force of gravity. Yet what equivalence means in translation studies is subject to varying interpretations. For instance, Despoina Panou reviewed nine conceptualizations of equivalence as informed by the theories of meaning from structuralism to pragmatics and Chomsky’s generative-transformative grammar (Panou, 2013). Panou noticed that these definitions often share a bipolar view that distinguishes semantic/formal equivalence from pragmatic/communicative equivalence. Despite the numerous interpretations of equivalence, the pursuit of equivalence has always served as an aspiration, a desire, and a goal that translators strive for (O’Keeffe, 2019). Or in other words, as Anthony Pym pointed out, the assumed equivalence between original and translated texts is merely a necessary social illusion (Pym, 2014), the effects of which ranges from engendering a translator’s aesthetic choice of fluency and natural-ness to making the translator invisible in translation practice.

Instead of producing fluent and natural texts that invisiblize translators and translation processes, more recent translational theories call for tracing, unpacking, and interrogating the translation practice and approaching it as a culturally bound and structurally conditioned process (Ergun, 2020; Pym, 2014; Venuti, 2008). Scholars note that transcending “the horizon of sameness” opens up the space to reconsider the roles, responsibilities, and ethics of translators (O’Keeffe, 2019, p. 230), whereas if equivalence is overemphasized, translators could miss opportunities to interrogate, challenge, and destabilize the existing hierarchical power structure in cross-language and cross-cultural communication (Venuti, 2008). Influenced by the recent translational theories, what has been conventionally considered virtues, such as fidelity to original texts, is subject to new interpretations.

As intimately as translation has been interwoven into cross-language and multilingual qualitative inquiry, the rigor and art of translation are inherently connected to the validity and trustworthiness of qualitative research. The ongoing push to move away from a single-minded pursuit of equivalence in translation invites researchers to re-envision the stakes, risks, and methodological centering of multilingual and cross-cultural methodological practice. Over the past four decades, qualitative methodologists have invested heavily in rethinking the concepts of and theories on voice, silence, representation, and language (e.g., Carspecken, 2003; Denzin, 2002; MacLure, 2013; Stone & West, 2012; Temple & Young, 2004). As we reject a representational truth that was built on a correspondence theory of meaning (Carspecken, 2003; Denzin, 2002; Freeman & Vagle, 2013; MacLure, 2013) and continue to problematize the impositional position for researchers to “give voice to” their research participants (Smith, 2021), questions remain regarding how to approach translation, a practice that has conventionally prioritized the equivalence of meanings across different languages and relied on a certain level of mediation. It is exactly in this sense that we consider translation as a methodological question, one that is intricately linked to the core concepts of methodological theory such as validity, trustworthiness, and transparency, and poses both challenges and opportunities to researchers engaged in border-crossing and multilingual work.

In this methodological paper, we first reflect upon how the field of qualitative methodology has been imagining and enacting translational practice through the pursuit of equivalence, and then explore how, if we dislodge the association between “translation” and “equivalence,” qualitative researchers might differently conceptualize the validity and trustworthiness of translational practice. As we will show in this paper, embracing the uncertainty and differences in translation creates space to recognize the culturally bound/typified meaning-making process and to interrogate the power structure that conditions interpretation. Such methodological practice will in turn enhance the validity and trustworthiness of qualitive research. To illustrate this point, we apply Phil Carspecken’s critical reconstructive analysis, specifically, the meaning field and validity horizon analysis, to both original and translated texts (Carspecken, 1996, 2007) and discuss the differences in our interpretations. By explicating a text’s layered meanings and grappling with uncertainties in meaning-making, we demonstrate the methodological possibility of enhancing the validity of qualitative research through a recognition of the differences in meaning rather than through the pursuit of sameness in translational practice.

Moving Beyond Equivalence in Qualitative Research

Methodological literature has broadly defined equivalence as “the similarity between linguistic expressions in one language and their translation in another” (Sutrisno et al., 2014, p. 1338). Mandal (2018) further highlights three levels of equivalence: the lexical, the conceptual, and the dynamic¹. Lexical equivalence anchors the sameness at the word level, seeking one-to-one equivalence between the original and the translated texts; conceptual equivalence seeks sameness at the sentence level; and dynamic equivalence strives for sameness on the pragmatic level (Mandal, 2018). Specifically, the gravitational pull of equivalence manifests itself in different methodological practices. Below is a non-exhaustive list of the widely adopted practices:

• Categorization: Researchers classify original texts as either translatable or untranslatable. If researchers/translators can find an equivalent expression in the targeted language through a rigorously defined procedure, that is, “a procedure in which the same situation is replicated as in the original but different wording is used” (Vinay & Darbelnet, 1995, p. 32), then this part of the text is deemed translatable. Researchers/translators, however, cannot find the equivalent counterpart in the target language to the original language if the text is deemed untranslatable. Thus, the ability of achieving equivalence between the original and the target texts to a great extent informs translatability. For the untranslatable component, researchers proposed two different approaches to addressing it, exclusion and inclusion-transliteration respectively.

• Exclusion: The components of the original text that are deemed untranslatable are excluded in the translation and further in the remaining research process, which often takes place in constructing research instruments, such as survey items or interview protocols, and further leads to marginalization, exclusion and even erasure of the untranslatable discourse (Brislin, 1970, 1980; Jones & Kay, 1992; Lopez, et al., 2008). We suspect that this erasure is often done in the name of cleansing research discourse – in other words, in the name of achieving “scientific” rigor (e.g., Chen & Boore, 2010; Lopez et al., 2008). For instance, Brislin’s seven-step model of translating survey items from one language to another starts with the identification of translatable items, namely, language that is free of colloquialisms and idiomatic phrases (Brislin, 1970, 1980). Although it has been half a century since Brislin first proposed this approach for designing surveys, it remains influential in contemporary research. Qualitative researchers in particular have built upon, revised, and/or critiqued this model to address translation in qualitative methodology (Larkin, et al., 2007; Lopez et al., 2008).

• Inclusion-Transliteration is the practice of retaining a term in the source language or rendering it using Romanized phonetic representation. Neither of these practices tells the reader the meaning of the term, which is usually in brackets or a footnote afterward (Halai, 2007). Transliteration is an inclusive approach that offers the opportunity to preserve the expressions that defy translation, but other questions must be considered: How shall we draw the line between what should be transliterated and what should be translated? Does choosing to transliterate concede the untranslatability or the impossibility of equivalence for a word, phrase, or sentence? These questions to some degree circle back to the categorization of translatable versus untranslatable, but also raise new questions such as whether equivalence is the choice of the translator and/or researcher or whether there is a shared standard among the research community. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the use of transliteration is a reflection on the competency of the translator: too many transliterations could imply a lack of adequate target-language vocabulary; too few could imply a lack of sensitivity to the complex contexts behind a word.

• Repetition/back translation: Originating in survey research and later adopted by qualitative researchers, back translation is a procedure used after the research team has completed the translation to validate the accuracy of the translated text (Brislin, 1970; Chen & Boore, 2010; Lopez et al., 2008; McDermott & Palchanes, 1994; Twinn, 1997). To perform back translation, a translator (or team of translators) re-translate the translated text back to the source language without looking at the original text. The original version is then compared to the back-translated version to determine the validity of the translation (Chen & Boore, 2010; Esposito, 2001; Lopez et al., 2008; van Nes et al., 2010). It is assumed that the more identical the two versions are, the more valid the translation. Back translation is considered by many to be the gold standard in determining the accuracy and correctness of the translation. For instance, the Ethical Review Boards in some universities require that researchers provide back-translated versions of research instruments to prove their validity. Aiming to “iron out differences rather than investigate complexities” (Temple, 2008, p. 361), the pursuit of equivalence here creates conditions for legitimizing the practice and products of translation.

As discussed above, the pursuit of equivalence as methodological practice compels us to ask how differences and uncertainty in linguistic border-crossing have been conceptualized and addressed; that is, should researchers consider differences and uncertainty in translation as threats to validity in qualitative research and thus work hard to eliminate them? Or is it possible to fully exclude them at all? Contemporary critical-oriented translational theories offer a different approach to addressing this issue, taking uncertainty and differences in meaning-making processes as the entryway for dialogues on visibility, power, and authenticity (e.g., Burkhard & Park, 2023; Temple & Young, 2004; Wang & Poon, 2010). What we learned from this set of literature is that translation does not happen in a decontextualized process of textual analysis. Rather, it is embedded in a complex web of social, political and cultural meaning-making. Take the term “untranslatability” as an example. Literary theorist Emily Apter points out that the practice of nontranslation, together with retranslation, mistranslation, and other decisions made by translators and impacted by cultural differences and geopolitics, have all contributed to reshaping the contour of our literary and cultural imagination (Apter, 2014). In methodological practice, recognizing and reflecting upon differences and uncertainty can visiblize the power relationship and cultural situatedness of our meaning-making processes, and, meanwhile, allow translators/researchers to take a more agentic role in the interpretation of qualitative data. This reflexive process will in turn enhance the validity of qualitative research.

Critical Pragmatism on Symbolic Representation and Meaning-Making

To move beyond a translational practice that solely relies on equivalence to enhance its validity, we introduce critical pragmatism as an underlying theory of meaning to shed light on the significance of difference and uncertainty in qualitative research that involves translation. From the perspective of critical pragmatism, texts, narratives, and knowledge claims in general are not a flat and static correspondence between symbols and meanings that one relates to in a representational manner. They are foremost speech acts, that is, utterances considered social actions that take place in specific contexts, uttered in relation to a given audience and carrying a certain intention of the speaker or writer (Austin, 1975; Habermas, 1984; Mead, 2015). In this sense, to translate a text is to engage in understanding its meaning as a speech act, which is pragmatic and communicative in nature, rather than treating the text as merely a representation of intact and fixed meanings.

Meaning Field and Translation

Meaning is never a predetermined single “point” that one can extrapolate out of context, but rather a bounded range of possibilities, which Carspecken terms as the “meaning field” (Carspecken, 1996, 2001). Although it is not a closed system, “meaning field” is bound in the sense that certain possible interpretations can be ruled out for any given speech act: possibilities may not be exhausted and new possibilities may emerge with new understanding. If the concept of equivalence has encouraged us to imagine translation primarily as linear associations between linguistic symbols in the source languages, and their corresponding symbols in the target language, then the concept of meaning field profoundly challenges such a perception by introducing uncertainty, recognition, and reflexivity as inherent components of meaning-making (Carspecken, 1996, 2001).

Since meaning in a speech act is first presented as a range of possibilities, translators endeavor to grasp this range in their translational practice. Yet uncertainty always exists in the sense that the possible meanings are not determined exclusively by the linguistic symbols themselves nor by the linguistic structures but are validated through contextualized interpersonal communication and recognition. This interpretive process calls for position-taking, as recognition always involves decentering a first-person perspective and assuming the position of either dialogue participant (second person) or generalized/specific third person. In this sense, reflexivity is also an integral part of understanding meaning, as recognition and validation require an explicit or implicit grasp of the consensus and the differences among the dialogue participants. In the following sections, we demonstrate that the binary of translatable versus untranslatable collapses if it is accepted that meaning is fundamentally a range of possibilities. Instead of pursuing linear equivalence, explorations of convergences and divergences in layers of possible meanings could prove more productive in revealing differences, building consensus, and understanding nuances in communication across languages and cultures. Such a move is fundamentally intersubjective, as opposed to instrumental and monologic.

Cultural Typification and Translation

We consider a meaning field as bound partly because understanding and/or reconstructing it engages the ability to recognize the culturally typical scenes and references, or “cultural typification,” initially theorized by social theorists such as Alfred Schutz (1972; Bernstein, 1978) and later discussed by Carspecken (1996). The notion of “culture” has become an indispensable and yet contested theme in social inquiry. Rather than dive into a lengthy and convoluted discussion of the concept of “culture” (e.g., Benhabib, 2002; Geertz, 1973/2017; Williams, 1976/2015), we will highlight, instead, the cultural embeddedness of a speech act; that is, a speech act is always understood in the context of social and cultural practices. Such practices are typified in the sense that they offer traits and patterns that enable the comprehension of their meanings against a general cultural background. For instance, in their discussion of translation from Mandarin to English, Ho et al. (2019) point out that idioms in Taiwan are mostly learned via their historical backgrounds, and thus are typically culturally and contextually bounded.

In our experimental analysis of the original and translated texts below, we encountered “cultural typification” at many points. “Cultural typification” reveals itself in such discussions as those concerning cultural competency, identity and positionality, reflexivity, and inference-making. The issue of cultural typification has taken different forms in our discussion as well: at times, it is about the social norms formed in a particular context that mediate the construction of individual and collective identity; at other times, it is related to one’s lived experience growing up as a member of a certain ethnic and/or cultural group; and at still other times, cultural typification is associated with the onto-epistemologies historically formulated in a society. Despite the multiple facets of the term “cultural typification,” a piece of cautionary advice from critical theorist, Seyla Benhabib (2002), is worth considering, namely, that we should not essentialize culture, or the typologies and patterns within a culture, as a system with reified boundaries or a static and flat whole, nor should we romanticize culture as inherently authentic and monolithic. Interpreting original and translated texts thus raises two questions: (1) Against which cultural context do we make sense of the texts? And (2) Have we paid enough attention to the non-monolithic, porous nature of culture? Language itself is always “alive” in the sense that while language is an enabling condition for a lifeworld, it is also being constantly reproduced and transformed through communicative practices. Therefore, it is always a challenge for translators to interpret culturally informed symbolic communication in contextualized ways.

Another potential risk of cultural essentialism, argues Benhabib, lies in taking a culture as autonomous while, at the same time, shutting off critical examinations of power relations within a culture and beyond. The linguistic-boundary-crossing practice of translation may very well shape and transform the linguistic contour of a culture instead of merely establishing a communication line between cultures. Benhabib’s second point against cultural essentialism necessitates a power analysis that taps into the varying macro-, meso-, and micro-level power structures and relationships that constitute, assemble, enable, and condition the contour of cultures. Regarding translational practice, this point raises the questions of whether translators are responsible for the examination of the power relationship within an original cultural context in their translations, and how translators should navigate the inter-cultural power dynamics in their work. In the context of qualitative research, these questions are inevitably related to the discussion of research ethics. The opportunity to raise and address these important questions is lost if we take for granted the pursuit of equivalence and invisiblize translators.

In light of the contemporary translational theories and critical pragmatic theories discussed above, we move on to a discussion of empirical examples that illustrate the relationship between, on the one hand, differences and uncertainty in translational practice, and on the other, validity and trustworthiness in qualitative research. Last but not least, we consider how a refined understanding of validity in translational practice could inform our qualitative research practice.

Two Illustrative Empirical Examples

Before we introduce the analyses, we will briefly discuss our experiences working across the boundaries of cultures and languages, a practice that is in alignment both with Venuti’s call for visiblizing translators and more recent methodological discussions on translator/researcher positionality (Gawlewicz, 2016; Kim, 2012; Temple & Edward, 2004; Turhan & Bernard, 2021). Later, we will demonstrate that while the consideration of a translator’s positionality is not a formulaic procedure, it does have important implications in the process of interpreting data.

Positionality

We consider ourselves critical qualitative methodologists and/or researchers who, at different points in our careers, have worked in two or more languages and navigated two or more cultural worlds. All of us had integrated translation into our everyday research practice before being introduced to the recent methodological literature on this topic. Though we all grew up speaking Mandarin and learning English as a foreign language in schools, we now use English as our primary academic language in our work at North American universities. We still speak and write in Mandarin frequently in communicating with a wide range of research participants from rural residents in North China (Pengfei) to vocational educators in Southeast China (Wen) to Mandarin-speaking international students in the United States (Pei-Jung) and to Chinese members of the diasporic population in North America (Pengfei and Peiwei). Our Mandarin-speaking experiences are neither homogeneous nor standardized. For instance, Pengfei and Wen share a similar dialect that is close to Mandarin, and this dialect is the spoken language that Pengfei used to talk with the rural Chinese residents she interviewed. Peiwei was exposed to a dialect that was more divergent from Mandarin. Pei-Jung spent her formative years in Taiwan where the Mandarin has a unique history and deviates from the standardized Mandarin spoken in mainland China. Some of us also have the experience of working/living with more than two languages. For example, Pengfei conducted some preliminary academic work in German and is learning French right now. Peiwei is exposed to Dutch through her partner. In what follows, we primarily draw empirical examples from our diverse experience in English-Mandarin translation to shed light on the issue of equivalence in translation and its implications for the validity of qualitative research.

The Illustrative Examples

After having piloted with different types of qualitative texts², we selected two sets of Mandarin Chinese-English bilingual materials for in-depth analysis. As shown in Table 1, Set 1 includes Chinese and English excerpts from a news report titled “In China, a School Trains Boys to Be ‘Real Men’” published in The New York Times (Huang, 2018). This bilingual news report is aimed at both a Chinese-speaking diasporic and an English-speaking readership. Although we know who wrote this piece, we do not know who translated it or which language the original text was first written in. Texts such as this news report could potentially become qualitative data accessible to both English/Chinese monolingual and English-Chinese bilingual researchers.

Table 1.

Bilingual Data Used in the Analysis.

	Data set 1	Data set 2
Chinese	“我们会教孩子去打高尔夫、去玩帆船、玩马术,”39岁的唐海岩说, “但是我们绝不培养娘娘腔.” 「我們會教孩子去打高爾夫、去玩帆船、玩馬術, 」39歲的唐海岩說, 「但是我們絕不培養娘娘腔。」	我本来做姑娘的时候月经不疼的, 都是在地震那会落下了病根, 以后每次来都只能在家里歇两天班, 哪也动不了. 我本來做姑娘的時候月經不疼的, 都是在地震那會落下了病根, 以後每次來都只能在家裡歇兩天班, 哪也動不了.
English	“We will teach the children to play golf, go sailing and be equestrians,” said Mr. Tang, 39, “but we will never cultivate sissies.”	When I was a young girl, I did not have menstrual pain during my period, but beginning at the time of the earthquake, I had to take a two-day sick leave every time I had my period. I could not do anything.

Set 2 contains a Chinese excerpt and its corresponding English translation from a life history interview with a Chinese woman who grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in the countryside of North China. Pengfei conducted the interview as part of the data collection in a long-term critical ethnographic study. Pengfei also transcribed and analyzed the interview in Chinese, and translated the excerpt into English in writing up the ethnography. In this case, we have a clear knowledge of how the original and the translated texts were produced and who translated the excerpt. Qualitative data such as Set 2 are only accessible to Chinese speakers; translation would be required to make it accessible to an English-speaking readership.

We decided to focus on these two sets of excerpts because they reflect the complex and varying processes through which translation and translators are incorporated into qualitative research. Both sets contain rich, layers of unpacked, contextualized meanings, but they also differ in several ways, from the roles of the translators, to whether the data were produced for the purpose of research, who the anticipated audience was, and whether there is clear knowledge about the process of the translation.

The Analytical Process

We used Phil Carspecken’s critical reconstructive analysis (1996, 2007) to explore the validity of translation in qualitative research. We analyzed both the original text and its translated version using meaning fields and validity horizon analyses. In the analyses of meaning fields, we articulated a list of possible meanings of the segments, representing their relationships with conjunctions. For example, of the sentence “I am sorry about that,” given in response to an accident that happened to the speaker, the researcher can potentially interpret its possible meanings as “I am sorry about what happened” AND/OR “I empathize with your feelings about this accident” AND/OR “I want to show that I am a caring person.” Once a range of possible meanings has been established, we then identify which validity categories (objective, subjective, normative/evaluative, or identity claims) can be associated with which possible meaning. In this analysis, researchers understand meaning as a range of foregrounded and backgrounded horizons and organize possible meanings of a speech act based on this horizon-like structure.

For our analysis, we divided ourselves into two groups of two researchers each. The groups took turns analyzing the material as it was presented in the two languages. For example, Group 1 analyzed the first excerpt in its Chinese version while Group 2 analyzed its corresponding English version. Each of us analyzed the selected data using meaning field and validity horizon analyses. We then entered our analyses into an Excel sheet, and juxtaposed, compared, discussed, and clarified our reconstructions of meanings. The next section presents the key findings of our analysis.

Where Our Analyses Converge and where They Diverge

The goal of identifying where our analyses converged and where they diverged was to build our interpretive consensuses by looking at the converging analyses and to foster reflexivity by exploring the diverging analyses. What we found was that, even though texts in the original and target languages seem equivalent at first glance, articulating the meaning field of the utterances enabled us to identify the nuanced differences in our meaning-making process. In particular, we found that the divergences in our analyses often lay in the intermedium and backgrounded domains, whereas our analyses converged more in the foregrounded domain. Our interpretations also diverged when explicating the cultural norms and the unique epistemology that the text enacts.

For example, in analyzing the excerpt from “In China, a School Trains Boys to Be ‘Real Men,’” we agreed that (1) the intention of the coach is to cultivate masculinity through sports, and (2) the coach firmly believes that masculinity is something that can be cultivated. Our analyses also highlighted the idea that masculinity in this context is considered to be a feature unique to and laudable for boys, one that is differentiated from femininity in an essentialized binary gender structure. All our analyses connected the specific iterance in the article to more general social contexts, such as the role of education, gender norms, and the mechanisms for enacting individual and social changes. We found that the most significant divergence in our interpretations lay in the backgrounded meaning of the text, in which both Peiwei and Pengfei noted the elitist assumption that only expensive sports are adopted as tools to cultivate masculinity. Drawing on their understanding and lived experience of contemporary China, Peiwei and Pengfei argued that the Chinese public generally views activities such as golfing, sailing, and equestrianism as elite Western sports that only rich people can afford. This inference did not register in either Pei-Jung’s or Wen’s analysis. Recognizing this elitist assumption could potentially lead to an intersectional analysis of how gender imaginations and class taste intersect in shaping what is considered as “state-of-the-art” masculinity in contemporary China and who is considered to be masculine. It also lends itself to a more dynamic exploration of the neoliberal and postcolonial effects of gendering in today’s metropolitan areas in China.

Compared to the interpretation of the news report, which was meant to engage a broad bilingual readership, the interpretation of the interview excerpt in which a Chinese woman recounts her experience after an earthquake during the Cultural Revolution proved to be a greater challenge. On the one hand, compared with our analyses of the report on masculinity and golf, the research team found more divergences among our analyses of Excerpt Set 2; on the other hand, we noted a similar pattern in the analyses of both sets, namely there were more divergences in the intermediate and backgrounded domains. For instance, in the backgrounded domain, different analyses emerged regarding how this participant felt about the earthquake’s lasting impact on her, an impact that caused her to experience severe pain during her menstrual periods. Peiwei’s analysis highlighted the traumatic feeling caused by the earthquake; Wen’s and Pei-Jung’s analyses focused on the normative-evaluative dimension of the recollection, that is, that according to Chinese cultural tradition, work should always come before individual health. Along this line, Wen emphasized that the person felt greatly honored by her sacrifice, and Pei-Jung wondered if the participant felt inadequate because of her absence from work due to her menstrual pain: both the feeling of being honored and the feeling of inadequacy are framed and enabled by the widely circulated collectivist norm that calls for individuals to sacrifice themselves to the larger collective cause. Pengfei, however, came up with a different analysis: she thought the interviewee was able to maintain an emotional distance from her younger self, who was very much committed to her collectivist work. Pengfei noted that, the interviewee, in looking back, expressed a sense of disappointment and regret in recounting her previous experience. These differences in analytical foci highlight the nature of meaning field as discussed earlier, namely, that an act of speech is always grasped by interpreters as a range of possible meanings.

Another divergence in interpreting Set 2 is related to understanding the unique epistemology inherent in the interviewee’s speech act. In explaining why she began suffering severe menstrual pain after the earthquake, the interviewee implicitly enacted traditional Chinese medical knowledge, which mandates women having their menstrual periods to avoid touching cold water, because doing so could cause severe menstrual pain in the ensuing years of their life. Against this teaching, when the interviewee was performing her disaster-relief work right after the earthquake, she had to deliver message to her fellow villagers by spending hours walking in cold water everyday as the earthquake was followed by a flood in her area. The interviewee thus inferred that her sufferings from severe menstrual pain is due to her exposure to cold water in this disaster relief work. Pengfei included her enactment of the traditional Chinese knowledge as backgrounded meaning while the rest of the team did not.

What we consider most important is not the search for identification and equivalence but the reflection brought forth through the discussion of convergences and divergences in our analyses. For instance, as we explored what had led us to our differentiated understandings of golfing, sailing, and equestrianism in the first set of the illustrative examples, it became clear that we explicitly linked our meaning-making practice with those cultural milieus with which we are familiar and which we have access to. Pei-Jung explained that it had never occurred to her that sailing might be an elite sport: growing up in Taiwan and being close to the ocean, she viewed sailing as a leisure sport accessible to the general population. She shared that, in one of the schools in which she taught, there was a sailing club, and students sailed regularly on the weekends. In the second example on the Chinese woman’s deeply visceral account of post-earthquake work and menstrual pain, Pengfei called upon her ethnographic work on socialist rural youth, her long-term relationship with the participant, and her reading of the relevant literature to help her develop deeper interpretation the interview excerpt. Peiwei and Wen commented that, although they belonged to the same generation as Pengfei, growing up in a post/late-socialist era that had effectively wiped out many memories and records of the Cultural Revolution had made it challenging for them to make sense of the text. Pei-Jung, however, realized that she was almost a complete outsider to this history as Taiwan had never established a socialist regime; her struggle lay, instead, in deciphering the collectivist norms, which had never been part of her lived experience.

As the examples above show, our reflections went beyond equivalence to delve deeper into the process of meaning-making, a situated, contextualized, and historicized process. We unavoidably brought who we are and where we came from into the meaning-making. Even though this was not immediately apparent in the way we articulated the foregrounded meanings of the two excerpts, it loomed large in explicating the implicit meanings.

The Culturally Situated Interpretations that Undo the Insider/Outsider Dichotomy

In our further deliberation of the diverging interpretations of the excerpts, we explored how intra-cultural heterogeneity has shaped our interpretations. It would have been convenient to claim our cultural insider position in interpreting the excerpts. However, a closer look into our diverging interpretations reveals that the cultural insider/outsider dichotomy does not hold especially given how porous and heterogeneous a culture can be. For instance, Pei-Jung’s reflection shows that the cultural norms and practices in socialist and contemporary China are not part of her lived experience, and thus were not available to her in her meaning-making process. While Pei-Jung analyzed most of the training activities in Excerpt Set 1 through the lens of “what is educationally meaningful,” the three researchers from mainland China were preoccupied with the cost of these expensive sports – golfing, sailing, equestrianism – their Westernized nature, and their association with elite class status. This interpretation was not evident to Pei-Jung who grew up in Taiwan, where a golf club was first established in 1919, and where the evolution of the sport implies a parallel between Taiwan and the Western world. Although golf is not a sport practiced daily in Taiwan, it is more accessible to the general public than it is in mainland China.

Even for Peiwei, Pengfei, and Wen, all of whom grew up in mainland China, being categorized as insiders of the mainland Chinese culture does not afford them a homogeneous interpretation of the examples. For instance, a historically and culturally grounded interpretation of Set 2 would require an understanding of the unique gender discourse in China’s socialist period, but the erasure of the country’s difficult past has deprived many members of the younger generation of the opportunity to understand what happened in the immediate past. Due to her research interest in youth identity development in the transition from the Cultural Revolution to the Opening and Reform era, Pengfei was able to read more into this period and contextualize the excerpt based on her historical understanding, whereas Peiwei and Wen had limited exposure to the older generation’s experience and thus were less able to add nuance to their analyses.

As the examples indicate, meaning does not locate itself in the corresponding relationship between the original and the translated texts, rather, meaning dwells in the interpretive process in which culturally situated typification intersects with linguistic competence. Being reflexive in translational practice means embracing the differences generated through interpretation and exploring what leads to varying interpretations. Our collaborative exploration reveals that these interpretations are often situated in and related to our positionalities, ones that refuse to be fixed or oversimplified in any dichotomous fashion. If our understanding of translation stops at identifying equivalence, then we unavoidably miss the opportunities to explore the implications of differential interpretations. The practice of critical reconstructive analysis, however, sets the stage for meaning to be extended, debated, and mutually recognized. This process may simultaneously reveal gaps in meaning-making while it expands a researcher’s interpretive horizon. In this way, the development of the researcher is also implicated in the deliberation process of identifying and discussing differences.

The Seemingly Untranslatable and the Ready-To-Hand Translatable

The section above examines places in our analyses where equivalence could almost be claimed, yet differences and uncertainties still inform the meaning-making process among the four researchers. In this section, we zoom in and probe into two moments in our work when (1) equivalence is almost impossible to reach and (2) equivalence seems to be ready to hand.

The first example is the translation of the Chinese phrase “落下了病根” that was used by the woman who blames her menstrual distress on the earthquake. The literal translation is “the root of chronic disease was planted.” A search of the Chinese Text Project, the database of ancient Chinese texts, “reveals that the term “病根 (binggen)” is very likely derived from the traditional Chinese medical tradition that ascribed to every disease a physical or mental root cause and suggests that every minor disease or injury that is not fully cured could become the root of a future problem or chronic illness³. In everyday communication, the term has been used both medically and metaphorically to refer to the cause of an evolving, long-term negative situation (Ministry of Education, 2021). When the interviewee used this phrase to describe her experience, she also expressed a sense of powerlessness—she felt that she did not have the freedom to choose her own action in the particular political context in which she lived. However, none of this can be expressed clearly and fully in English using a simple phrase; it requires detailed annotation. The ‘untranslatable’ term thus calls for not only a recognition of the limits of translation but also a need for further exploration of the deeper cultural meaning embedded in the very context (Jagosh & Boudreau, 2009).

In the article about golf and masculinity, “高尔夫/高爾夫 (gaoerfu)” is a transliteration of the word “golf”, which refers to the very sport that originated in Western countries and then was introduced to Asia. Until the 1980s, the sport was banned in China by the Chinese Communist Party because it was considered too bourgeois (“Golf in China”, 2021). Since then, it has become a symbol of a Westernized modern lifestyle reserved for the rich. If we simply translate “高尔夫/高爾夫” back to English, it achieves a perfect literal equivalence, that is, both the original and the translated terms refer to the sport that shares a universal set of rules and a common setting. But the translation can hardly convey the loaded meaning of this term in China’s non-Western and late-socialist context nor can it convey the particular type of masculinity that is associated with playing golf in today’s China. In the discussion of translingual practice among Chinese, Japanese and Western languages, Lydia Liu argues insightfully that the introduction of Western terms into the modern Chinese language took place in an era when it became impossible for Chinese people to “maintain a separate identity for themselves without making implicit or explicit references to the rest of the world, which is often represented by the West” (Liu, 1995, p. xvii). The example of the translation/transliteration of golf illustrates the dependence of cultural contexts on making sense of meaning in an increasingly entangled world. Thus, the equivalence in semantic meaning should not be taken as equivalence in pragmatic meaning. Even in cases where we can find a close match between the words in the original language and those in the target language, we should not assume that such translation is fixed or valid. Instead, a scrutiny of the nuanced interpretive differences could lead to interrogation of power structures and relationships in the further analysis of the data.

Discussion and Implications

Rather than looking for fixed and correspondence-based equivalence between original and translated texts, in the illustrative examples discussed above we explored a wide range of possible meanings of the texts from the explicit to the implicit as interpreted by the authors. Our approach is informed by critical pragmatism, in light of which we consider uncertainty and difference as intrinsic parts of meaning-making. Engaging in generative conversations and consensus building on differential interpretations in turn helped us to reflect upon the relational and culturally bound process of cross-language meaning-making. Our experience leads us to believe that a process of this type will enhance the quality of qualitative research and strengthen the validity and trustworthiness of our work.

Indeed, the past three decades have witnessed a proliferation of the theorization of validity and trustworthiness in the field of qualitative research (Birbili, 2000; Cho & Trent, 2006; Dennis, 2013; Onwuegbuzie & Leech, 2007; Tracy, 2010). A point of productive contention among many methodologists, the conceptualization of validity is anchored in differential ontological and epistemological approaches (e.g., Carspecken, 1996; Giorgi, 2002; Lather, 1993), is unpacked via a wide spectrum of ethical commitments (Dennis, 2018; Hammersley, 2007), and is discussed within conventional and innovative research designs (e.g., Call-Cummings, 2017; Creswell & Miller, 2000; Dazzo, 2023). Yet across the board, we have seen more and more qualitative methodologists place reflexivity and criticality at the center of this conversation and locate them as the pillars of qualitative inquiry (e.g., Call-Cummings, 2017; Dennis, 2013, 2018; Lather, 1986, 1993). In this paper, aligning our work with this line of literature, we specifically developed an argument that calls for a reconceptualization of validity and trustworthiness of qualitative work related to translation: We propose qualitative researchers to move away from the conceptualizations of translational validity grounded on the pursuit of equivalence and to integrate reflexivity and criticality in evaluating the quality of translation-related work in qualitative research. Using selective examples of critical reconstructive analyses, we have demonstrated an approach to achieve reflexivity and criticality through embracing, dialoguing about, and reflecting upon the uncertainty and difference in translation. Uncertainty and difference thus are not merely threats to the validity of translation-related qualitative work; if addressed appropriately, they can catalyze researchers’ interrogation of their own positionality as well as different forms of power dynamics.

As we conclude this paper, we would also like to acknowledge that all of us, the co-authors of this paper, are bi/multilingual speakers coming from similar cultural and linguistic backgrounds. As such, our paper is limited in offering what a conversation regarding uncertainty and differences might look like for multi-national research teams in which not everyone is multilingual. From the perspective of equivalence and fidelity, the concern of validity and trustworthiness surely lies in the inaccurate conveyance of meaning in translated texts, and that is why existing literature has meticulously emphasized the role of translators and the importance of collaboration. From the perspective of uncertainty and differences, however, we would caution against a single-minded desire to fixate on meaning without unpacking the contextualized nuances in translation or engaging in sufficient dialogue about differential understandings. In cases where conventional methods to enhance validity, such as member checking and peer debriefing, are mediated through translation, researchers should not only focus on equivalence as the effect of the products but also the generative process of addressing uncertainty and differences. In this process, while as a general tenet we privilege a linguistic and cultural insider’s perspective, we also need to recognize that an individual’s positioning in relation to a culture and a language can be much more complex than a dichotomy, especially given that the concepts of “culture” and “language” are socially constructed and subject to continuous reiteration and reconstruction through everyday practice.

At last, we hope our work can inspire more qualitative researchers to incorporate a multilingual/translingual/translational dimension into their reflexive practice and in their addressing of the quality of their work. As we continue to problematize the monolingual biases in qualitative research methodology, it is important to bring a more robust multilingual vision into the methodological conversation through the study of translation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We, the authors of this paper, confirmed that none of us have a financial or other interest in the subject/matter of the work in which we present here, which may be considered as constituting a real, potential or apparent conflict of interest.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Pengfei Zhao

Pei-Jung Li

Notes

References

Apter

(2014). Against world literature: On the politics of untranslatability. Verso Books.

Austin

J. L.

(1975). How to do things with words. Harvard University Press.

Baker

(1992). In In other words: A Coursebook on translation (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Benhabib

(2002). The claims of culture. Princeton University Press.

Bernstein

R. J.

(1978). The restructuring of social and political theory. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Birbili

(2000). Translating from one language to another. Social Research Update, 31(1), 1–7.

Brislin

(1970). Back-translation for cross-cultural research. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 1(3), 186–216.

Brislin

R. W.

(1980). Translation and content analysis of oral and written materials. In Triandis

H. C.

Berry

J. W.

(Eds.), Handbook of cross-cultural psychology (2, pp. 389–444). Allyn & Bacon.

Burkhard

Park

S. J.

(2023). Translating (in) the margins: The dilemmas, ethics, and politics of a transnational feminist approach to translating in multilingual qualitative research. Qualitative Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941231165889

10.

Call-Cummings

(2017). Establishing communicative validity: Discovering theory through practice. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(3), 192–200.

11.

Carspecken

P. F.

(1996). Critical ethnography in educational research: A theoretical and practical guide. Routledge.

12.

Carspecken

P. F.

(2001). Critical ethnographies from Houston: Distinctive features and directions. Critical ethnography and education. Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

13.

Carspecken

P. F.

(2003). Ocularcentrism, phonocentrism and the counter enlightenment problematic: Clarifying contested terrain in our schools of education. Teachers College Record, 105(6), 978–1047.

14.

Carspecken

P. F.

(2007). Reconstructive analyses. In Ritzer

(Ed.), The Blackwell encyclopedia of sociology. Blackwell Publishing.

15.

Chen

H. Y.

Boore

J. R.

(2010). Translation and back translation in qualitative nursing research: Methodological review. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 19(1-2), 234–239.

16.

Cho

Trent

(2006). Validity in qualitative research revisited. Qualitative Research, 6(3), 319–340.

17.

Creswell

J. W.

Miller

D. L.

(2000). Determining validity in qualitative inquiry. Theory into practice, 39(3), 124–130.

18.

Dazzo

G. P.

(2023). Can research heal? Toward restorative validity: Axiological commitments and methodological obligations as contact zones. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 22. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231164937

19.

Dennis

(2013). “Validity crisis” in qualitative research. Qualitative research: A reader in philosophy, core concepts, and practice (pp. 3–37).

20.

Dennis

(2018). Validity as research praxis: A study of self-reflection and engagement in qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(2), 109–118.

21.

Denzin

(2002). Confronting ethnography’s crisis of representation. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 31(4), 482–484.

22.

Ergun

(2020). Feminist translation ethics. In Koskinen

Pokorn

(Eds.), The routledge handbook of translation and ethics (pp. 113–131). Routledge.

23.

Esposito

(2001). From meaning to meaning: The influence of translation techniques on non-English focus group research. Qualitative Health Research, 11(4), 568–579.

24.

Freeman

Vagle

M. D.

(2013). Grafting the intentional relation of hermeneutics and phenomenology in linguisticality. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(9), 725–735.

25.

Gawlewicz

(2016). Language and translation strategies in researching migrant experience of difference from the position of migrant researcher. Qualitative Research, 16(1), 27–42.

26.

Giorgi

(2002). The question of validity in qualitative research. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 33(1), 1–18.

27.

Habermas

(1984). Theory of communicative action. In: Reason and the rationalization of society (T. McCarthy, Trans) (1). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1981).

28.

Halai

(2007). Making use of bilingual interview data: Some experiences from the field. Qualitative Report, 12(3), 344–355.

29.

Hammersley

(2007). The issue of quality in qualitative research. International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 30(3), 287–305.

30.

S.-S.

Holloway

Stenhouse

(2019). Analytic methods’ considerations for the translation of sensitive qualitative data from mandarin into english. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919868354

31.

House

(1997). Translation quality assessment: A model revisited. Gunter Narr Verlag.

32.

Huang

(2018). 何为男子汉培训机构欲“重塑”中国男孩./in China, a school Trains boys to Be ‘real men. The New York Times Chinese-English Bilingual version. Retrieved from https://cn.nytimes.com/

33.

Jagosh

Boudreau

J. D.

(2009). Lost and found in translation: An ecological approach to bilingual research methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 8(2), 102–114.

34.

Jones

Kay

(1992). Instrumentation in cross-culture research. Nursing Research, 41(3), 186–188.

35.

Kim

Y. J.

(2012). Ethnographer location and the politics of translation: Researching one’s own group in a host country. Qualitative Research, 12(2), 131–146.

36.

Larkin

P. J.

Dierckx de Casterlé

Schotsmans

(2007). Multilingual translation issues in qualitative research: Reflections on a metaphorical process. Qualitative Health Research, 17(4), 468–476.

37.

Lather

(1986). Issues of validity in openly ideological research: Between a rock and a soft place. Interchange, 17, 63–84.

38.

Lather

(1993). Fertile obsession: Validity after poststructuralism. The Sociological Quarterly, 34(4), 673–693.

39.

Liu

L. H.

(1995). Translingual practice: Literature, national culture, and translated modernity—China, 1900-1937. Stanford University Press.

40.

Lopez

G. I.

Figueroa

Connor

S. E.

Maliski

S. L.

(2008). Translation barriers in conducting qualitative research with Spanish speakers. Qualitative Health Research, 18(12), 1729–1737.

41.

Luo

(2011). Romans of the three kingdoms (1). Tuttle Publishing.

42.

MacLure

(2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667.

43.

Mandal

P. C.

(2018). Translation in qualitative studies: Evaluation criteria and equivalence. Qualitative Report, 23(10), 2529–2537.

44.

McDermott

M. A. N.

Palchanes

(1994). A literature review of the critical elements in translation theory. Image - the Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 26(2), 113–118.

45.

Mead

G. H.

(2015). Mind, self, and society: The definitive edition. University of Chicago Press.

46.

Ministry of Education . (2021). Binggen/病根. In Ministry of Education revised Mandarin Chinese dictionary/教育部重編國語字典 (6th ed.). Retrieved from https://dict.revised.moe.edu.tw/dictView.jsp?ID=19817&q=1&word=%E7%97%85%E6%A0%B9

47.

Nida

E. A.

Taber

C. R.

(Eds.), (1982). The theory and practice of translation. Brill Archive.

48.

O’Keeffe

(2019). Translation. In Di Leo

J. R.

(Ed.), The Bloomsbury handbook of literary and cultural theory (pp. 230–242). Bloomsbury Publishing.

49.

Onwuegbuzie

A. J.

Leech

N. L.

(2007). Validity and qualitative research: An oxymoron? Quality and Quantity, 41, 233–249.

50.

Panou

(2013). Equivalence in translation theories: A critical evaluation. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3(1), 1.

51.

Pym

(2014). Exploring translation theories (2nd ed.). Routledge.

52.

Schutz

(1972). The phenomenology of the social world. Northwestern University Press.

53.

Smith

L. T.

(2021). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Bloomsbury Publishing.

54.

Stone

West

(2012). Translation, representation and the Deaf ‘voice. Qualitative Research, 12(6), 645–665.

55.

Sutrisno

Nguyen

N. T.

Tangen

(2014). Incorporating translation in qualitative studies: Two case studies in education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(10), 1337–1353.

56.

Temple

(2008). Narrative analysis of written texts: Reflexivity in cross language research. Qualitative Research, 8(3), 355–365.

57.

Temple

Young

(2004). Qualitative research and translation dilemmas. Qualitative Research, 4(2), 161–178.

58.

Tracy

(2010). Qualitative quality: Eight “big-tent” criteria for excellent qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(10), 837–851.

59.

Turhan

Bernard

(2021). Challenges and strategies of translation in a qualitative and sensitive research. Qualitative Research.

60.

Twinn

(1997). An exploratory study examining the influence of translation on the validity and reliability of qualitative data in nursing research. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 26(2), 418–423.

61.

Van Nes

Abma

Jonsson

Deeg

(2010). Language differences in qualitative research: Is meaning lost in translation? European Journal of Ageing, 7, 313–316.

62.

Venuti

(2008). The translator's invisibility: A history of translation (2nd ed.). Routledge.

63.

Vinay

J. P.

Darbelnet

(1995). Comparative stylistics of French and English: A methodology for translation (11). John Benjamins Publishing.

64.

Wang

J. P. H.

Poon

M. K. L.

(2010). Bringing translation out of the shadows: Translation as an issue of methodological significance in cross-cultural qualitative research. Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 21(2), 151–158.