Researching Across Languages and Cultures
A guide to doing research interculturally
Description:... We are working within an increasingly globalised knowledge economy, where researchers collaborate in cross-cultural teams, collect data in a variety of languages and share findings for international audiences who may be unfamiliar with the cultural context. Researching across Languages and Cultures is a guide for doctoral students and other researchers engaged in such multilingual and intercultural research, providing a framework for analysis and development of their experiences.
Demonstrating the link between the theoretical approaches offered by the authors and the practical problems encountered by doctoral researchers, this ground-breaking book draws on research interviews with doctoral students from around the world. Students’ written reflections on their experiences are presented as interludes between each chapter. A practical, hands-on guide to planning, conducting and writing up research, the book explores the crucial roles involved in interpreting data across cultures within doctoral research.
Key topics include:
- The role of the interpreter and/or local research assistant in the research process and the ethics of translation.
- Constructing knowledge across cultures: addressing questions of audience, power and voice
- Academic literacy practices in multilingual settings
- The doctoral student’s role within the geopolitics of academic publishing and forms of research dissemination
- The pragmatics of mediated communication (implicatures, intentions, dialogue)
Researchers who come from and work in monolingual societies often forget that their context is unusual – most of the world live in multilingual contexts, where linguistic shifts and hybridities are the norm. Two authors with extensive experience, together with a number of their existing or former research students, share insights into these issues that surround language and culture in research.
This book will be a useful guide for academic researchers, doctoral students, research supervisors and Masters students who carry out empirical research in multilingual or multicultural contexts and/or are writing about their research for a diverse readership across the world.
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