Researching Multilingually: Considering Challenges and Opportunities

In this half-day workshop, we invite you to think about what it means to research multilingually

Does your research involve working with more than one language? You may be planning interviews with participants in a language that you are fluent in. Or perhaps you collected data in another language and now wonder how to best analyse them. What about representing qualitative data: do you need to provide the original as well as the translation? How do you even go about translating data or research materials?

A lot of research projects require working across multiple languages, which brings its own unique challenges and raises a lot of questions. In this half-day workshop, we invite you to think about what it means to research multilingually, particularly if your primary research does not concern the question of language itself. We will discuss a set of guiding principles and consider how these may apply to specific research projects. Whatever stage of research you’re at, you will have an opportunity to reflect on the methodological questions that multiple languages bring to your research process – from research design, through data collection to presentation of findings.

By meeting other researchers from various disciplines who have grappled with similar issues, you will have a chance to learn about the often hidden aspects of research projects to enable you to consider the questions of languages which often are taken for granted.

Organisers:

• Dr Piotr Wegorowski
• Dr Colin Reilly
• Daniel Calvert, PhD Student