A terminological issue in cross-language qualitative methods

What do you call it when someone hears something in one language, and then writes down the meaning in another language? It is technically not translation, interpretation, or transcription, in their purest senses, even though these terms are sometimes used to refer to the process or its products. Should we have a new term for this practice, especially to distinguish it from the alternative method of transcribing in the one language and then translating into the other?

This is an issue particularly relevant to qualitative research in Africa, where focus groups or interviews are often done in a language other than the one in which research analysis and reporting take place. It is also important in other multilingual countries and regions, and indeed some of my examples below come from experience in Afghanistan.

Two approaches

When I was managing research projects in Kabul in 2013, we handled qualitative data in the form of recordings of focus groups and in-depth interviews by having them transcribed in the source language (Dari or Pashto), then translated from the transcripts. This was standard in the company I worked with, and as a research practice, from all I had learned previously. I have in my possession, for example, a photocopy of a rather lengthy transcript of a recording in Fulfulde, prior to translation.¹

It was of some surprise, therefore, to learn from another organization in Kabul that they paid people to translate or interpret into English directly from recordings, with no same-language transcripts. I later found that this kind of shortcut is actually not that uncommon. For example, I am working on a digitization project involving tapes in diverse African languages, plus written translations or transcripts in French or English.² And see also the following excerpt from a recent position announcement, which does not even involve recordings (emphasis in original):

Notetakers will be responsible for capturing detailed and accurate documentation of focus group discussions and interviews in English, translating from Arabic to English in real time. The notetaker is thus the point person for all qualitative data obtained during the data collection phase.

Although skeptical about what seems like translating qualitative data "on the fly," since there is such potential for loss or distortion of information, and less facility in verifying the end product, I do recognize that there can be reasons - perhaps good ones - for such practice.³

The main issues here, however, are first to call attention to these different methods in qualitative research, which might be qualitatively different in their outcomes, and then to make the case for terminology to distinguish between them.

I'll begin with brief discussion of three terms already established in this space - transcription, interpretation, and translation - and then return to comparing these two approaches to cross-language qualitative data. I then consider possible blended terms to refer to the shorter approach.

Transcription

Transcription literally is conveying in writing - "reducing" the spoken language to its written form. By convention it refers to recording in the same language. Ideally a transcription should be verbatim, reflecting the actual words and expressions used.

The way one writes the language is a key consideration, though the general assumption in most cases I have encountered is to use the standard orthography. Transcription may also be phonetic, and this is common for example in linguistic research. There are gray areas between the two, as we found in Afghanistan, where speech in a language may vary in accent or regional variant forms, but which transcribers wrote in standard form - this we felt preserved the sense of what participants said in their languages, while facilitating later text analysis and translation.

The detail of transcription may vary, to the extent perhaps of indicating other sounds and vocalizations in addition to the meaningful speech.

Interpretation

Interpretation is conveying the meaning of a verbal utterances in one language into a verbal utterances in another. Interpretation may be in real time - either sequentially or consecutively, as is commonly done in formal or informal settings where someone interprets for two others who are speaking different languages, or simultaneously.

 

In any case, the usual assumption is that interpretation is done pretty close timewise to when the initial statement is made - at least when people are speaking directly. When a recording is involved, a spoken interpretation is usually not sought, but a written rendering of the meaning of the recorded speech might be - one of the situations of concern in this posting.

(The terms "interpretation" and "translation" are often used interchangeably, but here the strict definitions will be retained.)

Translation

Translation is the conveying of the meaning of text in one language into text in another. Translation may be more literal/word-for-word or more semantic/meaning focused. In the context of qualitative research, attention to the meaning and of the voice of participants is important.

The field of translation has seen a lot of change in recent years with specializations and the introduction and refinement of tools such as translation memory and machine translation.

From spoken source language to written target language

The context of cross-language qualitative data analysis is nicely summarized by Monique Hennink in her handbook on methods⁴:

In international focus group research, the group discussions are typically conducted in the language of the study participants, which may differ from that of the research investigators. Therefore, the tape-recording of the discussions will need to be translated and transcribed into the language of the research team for data analysis. The process may involve first transcribing the tape-recording in the language of the discussion and later translating the written document. This process will produce two transcripts: one in the original language of the discussion and a second translated transcript.

One advantage of having the two texts - one the transcript of the recorded discussions and the other the translation of that transcript - is in facilitating back checking of the translation. Another that the source language transcript can be used for text analysis.

Prof. Hennink continues⁴:

However, time and resource constraints lead many research projects to conduct the tasks of translation and transcription simultaneously, the outcome of which is a single transcript in the language of the investigators, with the tape-recording as the only record of the discussion in the original language.

Building on my previous discussion and illustrations above, here (below) is a quick schema illustrating these two approaches ("source language" here being the original language of the discussions, and the "target language" being that of the researchers, their analysis, and the final reporting or publication).

Two ways to get from spoken source language to written target language: In green, (1) transcription &
(2) translation; or in orange, (١) a direct rendering, for which there is/are not yet any specialized term/s.

What happens in the two-step process of transcription and translation (the green arrows, 1 & 2) is pretty straightforward. The transcription process may run into issues alluded to above in how to reconcile different pronunciations and usages with the standard language and its formal orthography, but these are problems common to transcription as a practice. Likewise, translation has its own set of issues such as whether to be more literal or more semantic.

On the other hand, what happens when the spoken source language data is not first reduced to writing in that language, but rather is rendered directly in the written target language (the orange arrow, with Arabic digit ١), is a process that needs more attention. It is clear, as already mentioned above, that the lack of a transcription in the source language makes verification of the product more difficult, and it also eliminates the possibility of text analysis in the source language.

But what about the process itself, what the person making the written target language product from the recording of the spoken source language? Should we think of that person as interpreting internally before writing, meaning perhaps an alternate two-step process? How does the quality of data processed this way compare with that of the formal two-step process above? Is this translation or interpretation, or should we call it something else? 

"Transterpretation," "interprescription," or ... ?

The process of rendering a recorded discussion in one language directly (one step) into a written record in another seems to be at the same time:

• similar to that of same-language transcription in that the person doing it would likely listen and re-listen to the recording in order to get it right;
• similar to interpretation in that they are working from what they hear, not something in writing; and
• similar to translation in that the product is in written form and as such can be revised and edited. 

It yields a product used in the same way as that produced by transcription followed by translation, but as far as I am aware, there have not been any comparative evaluations of the two. 

Still, since the two processes - the two methods to convert spoken discussions in on language into text in another - are different, it would at least be useful to have different terms to refer to them. One possibility would be to simply call the two-step method "translation," understanding that a preceding step of transcription is involved, and to coin a term for the one-step method. For the latter, two possible ways of blending the terms "transcription" and "interpretation" that would convey the sense of writing down one's interpretation of spoken language, are "transterpretation" and "interprescription" (for the latter, the product would logically be an "interprescript" - an interpretation transcript). Of course there may be better ideas, which would be welcome.

Simultaneous interprescription or transterpretation?

As mentioned above, there is also the other scenario where discussions may be interpreted and transcribed (at least as summary notes) in one step in real time, i.e., without a recording. This is another approach to cross-language qualitative data from focus groups or interviews, which also ought to have an appropriate term to facilitate reference and clarity about methods.

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1. These were transcriptions in handwritten Fulfulde photocopied by me around 1990, thanks to Prof. David W. Robinson. My intent was to use them for extracting lexical data for future revision of the Fulfulde lexicon.
2. These were produced by a project run by Nigel Cross and Rhiannon Barker that resulted in a book edited by them under the title At the Desert's Edge: Oral Histories from the Sahel (Panos, London, 1992).
3. As discussed below, limited resources and limited time are given as justifications for not transcribing in the source language. Another circumstance that might arise is where participants are not comfortable with being recorded, so a facilitator may make notes of their interpretation of the discussions (rather than attempt verbatim transcription or notes in the same language that need translating later).
4. Monique M. Hennink, International Focus Group Research: A Handbook for the Health and Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 214).

Epilanguages & sesquilingualism in Africa

A quick return to (English) terminology about languages in Africa. Earlier posts have considered why it is that a multilingual African is "bilingual" only if they speak two Europhone languages,¹ and the mixed messages in using the term "local language" for any African language.² Here I'll look briefly at two terms few have heard of and fewer ever use - epilanguage and sesquilingual. - and how they might fill out English vocabulary for understanding multilingualism in Africa.

Africa has hundreds or thousands of languages - the exact number depends on how you count them, since many fall in groups of more or less interintelligible languages - and many Africans are polyglots, or at least speak a little of several languages. But African multilingualism is complex beyond numbers - who speaks what, when, and where; what is changing in terms of which languages are used and how they are used; and of course the technological dimensions. Could these terms be used to help enrich linguistic analyses and language planning in Africa (and elsewhere)?

Epilanguage

The term epilanguage is a recent one (the earliest uses I've found go back only 10-15 years), which seems to have two general meanings:

• a language used above others for certain kinds of communication (an example being writing in Latin in Europe during the Middle Ages); and 
• a deeper linguistic structure involved for instance in how we learn.

Although the meaning of the prefix "epi-" is similar to one of the meanings of "meta-," epilanguage is not a synonym for "metalanguage."³

When I first encountered this term in the first sense some years ago (in a CFP), one of my thoughts was that it seemed to describe the position of Europhone official languages in Africa. It's only recently, however, that I have come back to it to do some small research on its usage and meanings. My thought is still that in considering the rather unique roles of Europhone languages in Africa, a term like epilanguage is relevant, reflecting what can be described as their "overlay" on the African linguistic terrain. It also would facilitate discussing them in terms of function (in administration, or in academic and literary production, for instance) without reference to their origin or the roles assigned to them by language policies.

Sesquilingualism

Citation of use of "sesquilingue" in 1570.⁴

To be sesquilingual means to speak or understand a second language only partially (the prefix "sesqui-" meaining one and a half). This phenomenon is common anywhere, but not something described often with this term, which is rarely used despite apparently being quite old.

Sesquilingualism can be on the individual or collective level. It may be the result of contact or formal learning, or be inherent to languages being closely related.

Linguist R. David Zorc distinguished these two situations in a context where formal second language learning was not involved (this was in a contribution to evaluating mutual intelligibility of certain languages of the Philippines).⁵ I interpret them as follows:

• A person may understand a language from frequent exposure, having thus learned it to some level short of being able to speak it fully
• All members of two language communities are able to understand each other's languages, even without fully speaking them (their sesquilingualism is a result of the languages being mutually intelligible)

There are also of course situations common in Africa where school leavers have only a partial command of the school language (generally Europhone, and unrelated to African first languages), and conversely cases where students may get more of the Europhone language in school and at home but little or no depth in their mother tongue (observed among some urban elites).

The ability to understand a language without being able to speak it has also been described as "passive bilingualism" or "receptive bilingualism" (among other labels; see the long thread following a question I posed on the Code-Switching Forum in 2007). This however would be only one part of the range of situations covered by "sesquilingualism."

Within the broadly acknowledged multilingual nature of most African societies, there would seem therefore to be various possible sesquilingualisms, collectively representing a factor that might be important for understanding the quality of communication and learning in various contexts. Have we been missing something, or is this not a significant issue?

Concluding thoughts

The two concepts - epilanguage and sesquilingualism - can be used together, of course, per the example given above of school leavers.

The two terms have clear cognates in French, Portuguese, and other European languages. Another question for another time would be how to speak of these two concepts, as well as other linguistic terms, in African languages.

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1. What does "bilingualism" mean in multilingual Africa? (26 Nov. 2013)
2. The problem with calling some languages "local" (3 Sep. 2014)
3. Although I understand from Coleman Donaldson that "epilinguistic" (or its French cognate) in French anthropological linguistics is the equivalent to "metalinguistic" in Anglophone academia.
4. J.F. Ossinger, 1768. Bibliotheca Augustiniana, historica, critica, et chronologica, Universitatis Bibliopolæ. p. 179.
5. R. David Zorc, 1986, "Some Historical Linguistic Contributions to Sociolinguistics," in P. Geraghty, et al, eds., FOCAL I: Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, 341-355. Pacific Linguistics, C-93.

Two issues in use of African languages in ebola messaging

A recent tweet highlights two issues about use of African languages in messaging about ebola in West Africa: nomenclature, the names and spellings of the languages; and re-use of material in one language variety (or dialect) in an area where another is spoken.

@donosborn Yep, I think #Wolof is newly added there, along w/msg from FLOTRG. "Madingo" & "Fullar" [sic] could find use in Senegal.
— zenodotus (@zenodotus) October 23, 2014

(NB- "FLOTRG" = First Lady of the Republic of Guinea.)

The reference is to two of the eleven language names for radio spots produced for the CDC (which have been mentioned previously on this blog). "Madingo" is actually a misspelling of "Mandingo," which may refer either to: (1) one of the Manding languages known to its speakers as Mandinka and spoken mainly in Senegambia; (2) the Mandingo "macrolanguage," a subgroup of Manding languages in the west of West Africa, including notably Mandinka, and Malinké (Maninkakan) of Guinea and neighboring countries; or (3) the entire range of Manding languages, per older usage (in English).

Misspellings happen - I also noted a couple on the Ebola Communication Network site (since corrected) - but they also make it hard to locate information in searches. But, the apparent imprecision on the Manding variety in which the radio spot is recorded is another issue: these languages have a significant degree of mutual intelligibility, but material in one of them on technical or sensitive topics will not necessarily be understood as intended by speakers of other varieties.

On the latter topic, Mary Crickmore, a high school classmate who later on took a different path to learning and working in Fula in Mali than I did, noted in correspondence how Fulfulde translations of sections of Where There is No Doctor ran into issues with some anatomy terms when tested in different parts of the country. I personally noted similar issues in shifting from Fulfulde in Mali to Pular in Guinea.

This is not to say that material developed for one variety of a language (or one of a group of close and mutually intelligible languages) cannot be used in others, but that attention to differences of expression and vocabulary is essential to being understood as one intends, so it is helpful to be clear about the specific language variety(ies) involved. (The flip-side of this issue is how materials and terminology developed separately in different varieties of a language can be compared and harmonized, which requires awareness about the relationships of languages.)

So possible re-use of the CDC radio spots in other countries where the languages are spoken (as suggested in the tweet above) would require review and likely a "localized" version to re-record. This in turn would benefit from access to scripts for such radio spots, or where these were not used or are not available, transcriptions, of the audio. (See 2Ds & 4Rs on this blog for further discussion.)

As for "Fullar," it is not a term I have encountered, but it clearly refers to "Fula" (or "Fulah" with that random or gratuitous "h") and "Pular" (the main endonym for the language in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau). Fullar in any event is not a standard term, and as such, would likely not be found in searches. (The case of names used for Fula is complicated enough already, without adding another term!)

The CDC radio spot webpage also lists "Themne" for "Temne" - the former is a known alternative spelling, and seems to be another case of the "random/gratuitous h."

Non-standard terms or spellings pose the same problem for searches that misspellings do. So, as more work is done on ebola messaging in African languages by diverse governmental, intergovernmental, nongovernmental, and academic organizations, there will be a need to catch instances where corrections are needed. Recourse might be made to the coding and names in ISO-639, as an available set of standards.

The problem with calling some languages "local"

Only in Africa, it seems, can a language spoken by millions be called a "local language." The term is used widely, not just in Africa, and although I've also used it, I'm increasingly finding it problematic as employed in African contexts for two main main reasons:

1. It is inexact, often serving as a catch-all term for languages other than the main Europhone official languages, from those like Akposso that are truly localized in use, to languages like Hausa spoken across many borders by many people of many backgrounds as a first or second language. 
2. It is misleading. As a term, "local language" implies a low rank of importance relative to "official language" or "language of wider communication," when for some languages and/or in some contexts such a hierarchy of importance would be inappropriate. In Senegal and Mali, for instance, Wolof and Bambara, respectively, are spoken more widely than French, but are sometimes referred to as "local languages." Such indiscriminate use of the term arguably pigeonholes languages and disincentivizes thinking about their use in communication, education, extension, etc.

At this point, I'd like to suggest that more thought be given to using the term "local language" when speaking and writing about African languages. It probably should be used much more sparingly than it is now. Sometimes a language really is local, but other times, what we may call "local language" in Africa is actually more widely spoken than some European languages that we probably never would call "local."

It may be that a key piece in more deliberate use/non-use of "local language" in Africa is informing development, health, diplomatic, and other specialists about the sociolinguistics, culture, and policies regarding African languages in areas they work. Should a basic course about African languages and multilingualism in development and contemporary society (this is different than studying a language or intro to African cultures) be part of the education of non-Africans planning to work in Africa?

"Neighbor languages" in an African context

A recent edition of The Economist has an article on Scandinavian languages (especially Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian) entitled "Neighbour languages." Although the cultural context and the fact these languages are standardized and widely used in written form, make their situation different than what one would find in Africa, some of the discussion sounds like it could describe closely related languages like the several Manding languages in West Africa, for instance, or the Nguni languages of South Africa.

The term "neighbor language" is used in academic discussions of Scandinavian languages - note for example the description of the keynote by Prof. Arne Torp to the recent (July 2014) conference of the Association for Language Awareness - and apparently also in popular discourse about these languages in English (judging by a quick online search; I have no way of assessing usage in the languages themselves).

It is tempting to suggest wider use of this term in discussing the sociolinguistic situations and language policy and planning needs in Africa. The term "neighbor language" itself would be seem accessible to a wide range of people who are not specialized in linguistics or language issues - including development experts, who nevertheless may discuss "local language" issues where they work.

The problem however is another aspect of the sociolinguistic geography in West Africa that is very different than that of Scandinavia. The term "neighbor language" in Scandinavia, as Prof. Torp points out, is a reference to linguistic similarity rather than geographic proximity. But the latter makes the term's use more or less unambiguous in that region (despite some linguistic diversity there). In much of Africa, however, a group of linguistic "neighbor languages" may be geographically interspersed with other unrelated languages, such that one's geographic neighbors may speak as their first language, something not mutually intelligible. Speaking of a "neighbor language" in that context could be interpreted linguistically or geographically.

All of this has me wondering if some term analogous to"neighbor languages" might be helpful in framing discussions and planning relating to languages in Africa. We already have "cross-border languages" to describe the common situation where first languages or regional lingua francas are spoken in two or more countries, and this concept was used by the African Academy of Languages in constituting several "Vehicular Cross-Border Language Commissions" to consider issues like harmonization of orthographies across borders.

But there does not seem to be an easy term to use when discussing "linguistic neighbor languages" in Africa.

This is important in Africa because for instance efforts to develop educational materials in a language that has close "linguistic neighbors" may be undertaken in isolation from (if not ignorance of the existence of) those neighbors. This has hidden costs in missed opportunities for sharing and adapting information among related languages. A way to easily refer to and call attention to those "neighbors" might facilitate awareness and productive discussions in this regard.

In any event, "neighbor languages" is a phenomenon not unique to Scandinavia and Africa, of course, and there are useful lessons to share across regions in how to accommodate and take advantage of similarity of closely related languages.

The Gallup World Poll and African languages

Gallup, Inc. has conducted its World Poll survey in 160 countries annually since 2005. Such an undertaking naturally involves many translations of the questionnaires (research instruments) for use in many different societies. According to Gallup's Country Data Set Details (2005-2013), in the 26 African countries where the poll was taken, questionnaires were translated into the following African languages, in addition to the Europhone official languages of most countries - English, French, or Portuguese (this list was keyed in from the country-by-country info in their data table; outlinks on language names are to Wikipedia articles):

Afrikaans Arabic Chadian Arabic Moroccan Arabic Ateso Bambara Bariba Bemba Dioula Ewe (Ghana, Togo) Fon Fulfulde (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali) Hausa (Ghana, Niger, Nigeria) Igbo Kabye Kaonde Kinyarwanda Kirundi Krio Luganda

Malagasy Mende Moore Ndebele Ngambaye Runyankole Setswana Shona Silozi Songhai Sotho Swahili (Kenya, Tanzania) Temne Tonga Twi Wolof Xhosa Yoruba Zarma  Zulu

This represents a significant effort, involving translations that are, as I understand it, done on the country level. It also implies a number of issues that would be interesting to explore further, such as how translations are handled for the several cross-border languages used in the poll (indicated in the above list by two or more country names in parentheses). A related issue is whether there is any cross-reference in the translation process between versions in very closely related languages (such as Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, or the Manding languages,.Bambara and Dioula (Jula), or the Nguni languages, Ndebele, Xhosa, and Zulu).

Another issue is assuring equivalency among translations from the original language (English) version into the whole range of languages. This is an obvious challenge for something of such wide multinational scope, for which the usual equivalency testing would be too hard and expensive (at least with available human language technology). How well can tight revisions of translations from the main language version(s) country-by-country, pair-by-pair assure that the same thing is being asked across diverse languages?

Yet another issue is how easily enumerators who speak the languages fluently, but have had little or no familiarity with the written forms of those languages can become competent in reading and administering questionnaires in them. Most if not all of the above languages have a written form, but some of these have had limited use - schools in Africa often focus uniquely on Europhone languages, and it's not uncommon to hear educated Africans say that they cannot read or write their mother tongue.

Finally, thinking about survey work in African languages generally, what might be the possibility of survey companies like Gallup and scholars doing academic research somehow sharing data on their translated questionnaires? Could this be useful towards developing terminologies for all future survey work, as well as for any attempts at analysis in languages of the surveyed?