Louise,
Can't you ask your interpreters to deliver simultaneous whispered
interpreting that keeps pace? We do it in court routinely, we can do it in
hospitals if doctors know how to handle it. You could be taking notes, and
recording the interpreter's output for future reference.
More info if you'd like it
Jan
-----Original Message-----
From: Health of minority ethnic communities in the UK
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Louise Locock
Sent: 28 February 2007 14:27
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: using translations in qualitative research
Thanks for the reference Emma - really useful. I recently worked on a
study for the NHS National Screening Programme for Sickle Cell and
Thalassaemia looking at personal experiences of the new universal
screening programmes, we included interviews in a range of other languages
(Urdu, Mirpuri, Sylheti, French and Portuguese). We made a decision not to
work through interpreters but to find experienced qualitative health
researchers able to work in those languages, whom we paid on a per diem
consultancy rate either personally or via their institution. We do
narrative interviews, where we start by inviting people to tell us their
story for as long as they want to, and some people will talk uninterrupted
for half an hour or so. As a result, interpreting was just not practical,
and we felt we needed trained interviewers used to building rapport, using
follow-up prompts, allowing pauses/silences etc. In all but the French
interviews, the researchers who conducted the interviews worked on their
own transcriptions/translations, and were able to answer queries from me
about factual and interpretive issues as we went through the analysis.
(For French we had a local transcriber, and I have a degree in French so I
did my own translations). It is an expensive option, however, and it took
a lot of organising to find a team of people with such a range of skills.
We had an extra grant to help us with the costs.It still means you are
somewhat removed from the data, even though I actually attended all the
interviews so I had some of that background contextual information you
acquire when interviewing. I feel very much closer to the French
interviews because I can work in the original. I didn't myself do the
interviews in French because it's 20+ years since my degree and I felt my
immediate oral fluency might not be up to it!
Louise Locock
DIPEx research group
University of Oxford
www.dipex.org
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