Analyzing Translated Data: Challenges and New Possibilities

• In Event: The Power and Possibility of Science Education Research in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Contexts: Unpacking Critical Issues

Abstract

Our work is situated in a community-based afterschool science program in a Midwestern city in the United States that engages resettled refugee youth. Most of the youth (high school sophomores to seniors) were born in Chin State of Burma or are children of Chin parents. Within Chin state, there are more than 20 different languages and dialects used, many of which are not mutually intelligible. As a result, most participants speak 3-4 different dialects, which they have learned through interactions with parents, family members, and friends who speak different languages. In our setting, typically more than five dialects were spoken in our setting, and none of our research team speaks any Chin dialect or language spoken in Burma.

While implementing the afterschool program, we collected data through interviews and video-recordings of afterschool sessions. The goal of our research is to understand emergent multilingual learners’ participation in science learning through multilingual and multimodal means. We facilitated a yearlong program (22 weekly sessions) with a framework of responsive pedagogies that encourage youth to draw upon their diverse linguistic, cultural, and experiential resources. Our analysis sought to understand how youth engage in critical science literacy (Tan, Barton, Turner, & Gutiérrez, 2012), so we focused on themes such as youth translanguaging, youth goals to transform society, the participants’ skillful positioning of selves and others, and how they connected their wide range of experiences to climate science phenomena.

Arising from our research, our question is methodological. We would like to examine, illuminate, and celebrate how the youth utilized their multilingual and multimodal resources, thus moving the field away from deficit-oriented scholarship and toward a recognition of youth resources that can advance equity in STEM learning research. However, when no member of our core research team could understand participants’ languages, we found our natural inclination was to pay more attention to any English utterance because it is easy to make meaning out of English-spoken data. We are concerned that this tendency could perpetuate a view that English is more powerful or important than other languages, a notion which is antithetical to our work. To honor youth languaging practices, we identified some video excerpts that seemed important for analyzing youth learning and engagement, and we asked a local community member who speaks multiple Chin dialects to translate the transcripts. To the translated data, however, we cannot apply the traditional conversation analytic techniques because we cannot make sense of the fine-grained semiotic nuances in utterances of languages we cannot comprehend. Moreover, sometimes we happen to have multiple translations of one transcript from multiple translators, and their translations were not identical. These challenges made us think that other research teams may have similar conundrums, and that the methodological complexities and possibilities for new analytic approaches for translated data are worthy of further discussion. A specific question guiding this discussion is: How can researchers conduct fine-grained discourse analysis of interactions and honor participants’ rich languaging practices when the researchers do not share proficiency in the languages spoken?

Authors

• Minjung Ryu, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Shannon Mary Daniel, Vanderbilt University

• Casey E. Wright, Purdue University

• Mavreen Rose Sta Ana Tuvilla, Purdue University