On being a foreign body in the field, or how reflexivity around translation can take us beyond language

Abstract

Translation in cross-cultural research is being increasingly acknowledged as a serious methodological issue in geography. Translation dilemmas present researchers with incommensurabilities of meaning, thus providing insights into culturally specific ways of being as expressed in language. However, reflexivity around translation in the field can also highlight those moments of cultural practice where language falls short of experience. Engaging with Wittgenstein's late work on language, and with more-than-representational theories, I explore a personal experience of investigating the local relationship between expression and experience in ethnographic fieldwork. Translation dilemmas, I demonstrate, may highlight not only culturally specific areas of meaning, but may also point to where the local language fails to account for the fullness of locally significant ways of being. Translation in cross-cultural research, I argue, is less about the decoding of texts, and more about coming to understand a form of life. This understanding must include practical as well as linguistic aspects. Researchers-as-translators need thus to remain sensitive to the limits to verbal communication in meaning-making; this sensitivity is aided by reflexivity encouraged by translating in the field.