ABSTRACT
At this point, we are faced with a dilemma about how to conclude this book. We set out to write a ‘guide to researching across languages and cultures’ – as indicated by our title. However, our intention was never to prescribe tools or methods, nor even to provide denitive answers to some of the questions we raise here! In this respect, our readers may consider that the term ‘guide’ was misleading and this recognition on our part has remained an underlying tension throughout the writing process. Should we conclude each chapter with a summary of the tools introduced and give explicit advice on how to go about the translation of spoken interaction with respondents or how a doctoral student can work eectively with translators? As will now be evident, we opted instead to end chapters with a box of reective questions emerging from our discussion, followed by an interlude written by a doctoral student about their related experiences of researching across languages and cultures. These reective pieces might be seen as tting with the ‘critical personal narrative and auto/ethnographic movement’ discussed by Mutua and Swadener (2004) in their work on decolonising research. For those readers who have found our approach too open-ended and were frustrated at the lack of ‘best practice’ lists of advice, we suggest that the need to be exible, reexive and responsive to specic contexts is really the only overarching guidance appropriate here. The challenge of researching and writing across languages and cultures can be summed up (to use Mutua and Swadener’s (2004: 7) words on decolonising research again) as ‘a messy, complex and perhaps impossible endeavour’.
