The key objective of this AHRC-funded Research Networking project Researching Multilingually is to invite researchers across a range of disciplines, through a series of seminars, to demonstrate how they theorise and operationalise their data collection processes when working in more than one language. The project will enable the project team to develop better understandings of and insights into how researchers who are researching in more than one language negotiate and interpret linguistic and cultural meaning in their data-whether dialogic, observational, textual, or mediated.
By locating our project within the AHRC’s highlight Translating Cultures theme, we aim to build cross-disciplinary and cross-domain research capacity by foregrounding this under-investigated epistemological and methodological domain. We aim to analyse how researchers translate cultures in the process of researching multilingually, by:
1. examining the experiences of researchers in translating, interpreting, and writing up collected and generated data (dialogic, mediated, virtual, textual) from one language to another;
2. exploring ethical issues in the representation of data across more than one language;
3. identifying methods and techniques that improve processes of researching multilingually; and
4. developing recommendations and guidelines for researching multilingually that can be implemented by all researchers, and research training programmes.
Although rooted in intercultural communication, linguistics, and interpretation and translation, our research will inform researcher practice across multiple disciplines in contexts wherever more than one language is involved in research design, instruments, data collection and generation, interpretation and translation, and writing up of research. The project team will disseminate the recommendations and guidelines to the research community via a workshop, a website, (international) conferences and an international peer-reviewed journal article. A further intended development of this project will result in two publications (a special issue of an international peer-reviewed journal, and an edited book).