Crossed wires: interpreters, translators, and bilingual works in cross-language research. Qual Health Res

Increasingly, researchers are undertaking studies involving people who do not speak the same language as they do. Sociologists have long argued that language constructs the social world at the same time as it describes it. However, the implications of this for cross-language research are rarely considered. Employing interpreters/translators and “cultural brokers ” in research raises methodological issues around the meanings of concepts and how to convey difference. Using a project that employed two Asian mental health workers, the author teases out some of the implications for research of language difference. She focuses both on the value of a biographical approach and on the problems such an approach presents. In this article, I will address how English-speaking researchers carry out researchwith people who either do not speak English or do not use it as their preferred language. I put forward two models of such research and focus on the second as a way of attempting to move out of our own language to speak to “the other. ” In aim-ing to be objective, the first approach I present negates the importance of the researcher and the interpreter/translator and ignores his or her physical and intel-lectual presence in the research process. The second approach acknowledges the roles of both the researcher and interpreter/translator in cross-language research