An anthropological point of view: exploring the Chinese and Japanese issues of translation about teaching resources

Abstract

The aim of this study is to advance understading of teachers’ and researchers’ work, in particular its cultural specificities, from a resource perspective by exploring the issues and challenges faced during the translation of a theoretical framework, the Documentational Approach to Didactics (DAD), from Western (English and French) to East Asian languages (Chinese and Japanese). A basic assumption is that the challenges encountered while translating are driven by the cultural and linguistic differences that exist between the West and East. Adopting the perspective of the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD), we frame the translation work as a transposition process of research praxeology (a model of the researchers’ practices and knowledge) from a Western to an Eastern institution. We investigate this process to identify cultural elements at different levels (school, society, civilization, etc.) using the ATD framework. After translating a DAD article into Chinese and Japanese separately, we then worked collaboratively to identify similar or diverse translation issues and investigated their origins. Consequently, the results revealed a considerable difference between the West and East, and ample similarities between China and Japan, especially in terms of the researchers’ work and its relationship with the teachers’ work.