As a bilingual or multilingual speaker, have you ever conducted an interview in another language other than your primary one?
When conducting an interview in another language, it is more challenging, since the language itself adds an extra layer of understanding and interpreting to the whole work.
As a Mandarin speaker studying in an English-speaking country, most of time I conduct interviews in my second language as most of the participants are native English speakers. Sometimes I find myself is quite comfortable with this, though often I am less confident about doing this than in my first language. The familiarity with participant, participants’ willingness to talk, accent, and my nervousness all affect such feeling. Undoubtedly, the mastering of language is the first challenge.
It is a challenge to behave naturally, to lead the path of the interview and at the same time have to pay much attention on the process of language. Furthermore, with the difference of conventional conversation habits across languages, the interview conducted by people speaking another language may not seem natural enough for interviewees. It also requires longer time spent on transcribing afterwards for non-native interviewer. However, beyond these challenges of basic levels, the language brings us more. Especially as we all know, language is not standing alone, it always sits with the culture behind it.
There is one of significant challenge about understanding interviewee’s contextual meaning. Highlighted by the High-Low Context concepts from anthropologist Edward T. Hall; high context messages refers to those major meanings were internalized in cultural physical context and conveyed less by verbal expression, this part of massages can be hard for people outside the context. For a person who is not using one language as first language, those boundaries of high context messages can expand, failure to understand underlying meaning of words may mislead the analysis of interview to a large extent.
The linguistic competence can affect the emotional engagement in the interview as well, for instance, the trust building between interviewee and interviewer. When the interviewees think the researcher can deeply understand and relate to the things they talk, they also regard the listener as reliable and will be more likely to talk. Conversely, the confusion or uncertainty showed by non-native speaker interviewer may increase interviewee’ suspicion and consequentially affect the quality of interview.
However, sometimes, the challenges can be seen as a chance, since the principle of ethnographic interview is to always ask why and never assume we have already known the reason behind things, a group of ethnographers believe that, the barrier of language to keep us as an outsider can be helpful[1][2]. After all, “Could you tell me what you exactly mean by that?” is always an essential question for ethnographers.
On the other hand, being sincere and well-prepared help us to equip with some right things for those challenges. Trying to learn about the participants in advance, we can find a more effective way of communication. Whilst by showing the qualification as a good listener, we will encourage people to talk more.
Language is a tool, we get information via it but the information is not all about the words we transcribed. With all these challenges, the aim to do the ethnographic interview keeps the same, which is to understand from heeding, it is never too easy to do this, but also, we enjoy the charm of pursuing.
Reference
1. Chen, S.-H. (2011). “Power Relations Between the Researcher and the Researched: An Analysis of Native and Nonnative Ethnographic Interviews.” Field Methods 23(2): 119-135.
2. Winchatz, M. R. (2010). “Participant Observation and the Nonnative Ethnographer: Implications of Positioning on Discourse-Centered Fieldwork.” Field Methods 22(4): 340-356.
Hi Junying,
I can resonate with your post, as English is also my second language. I really like the point you made – although language can be a barrier for us to fully understand a group and/or a culture, it also provides us the chance to be an outsider. Being an outsider gives us the opportunity to see things in a different/fresh way than being an insider. Echoing Cat’s words, “assume nothing and question anything”, we are actually beneficial from being an outsider when conducting ethnographic research. On the other hand, as you mentioned, it is somehow less comfortable to conduct the research in our own language. Perhaps it is our task to learn.
Thanks for a post in the aspect of language. I enjoy reading it.