Aug 2026· Social Science Quarterly· Vol 107· 0 citations· 23 references
Abstract
This article explores that translation in cross‐language qualitative research is not merely a technical procedure applied to already‐collected data but an interpretive, ethical, relational, and power‐influenced practice that shapes every stage of knowledge production. It establishes how culturally and religiously embedded concepts resist adequate interpreting into English academic prose, and it offers methodological strategies and trustworthiness criteria for preserving meaning.
The analysis draws on a qualitative study of Pakistani immigrant women in the Dallas‐Fort Worth metropolitan area of Texas, examining how they navigate employment decisions, multigenerational household obligations, and cultural expectations within South Asian Muslim communities. Six Urdu and Islamic concepts, including izzat, barakah, tawakkul, qibla, bhai chara, and matawazan, were analyzed in depth. For each, the article specifies the literal translation, the cultural and religious meaning, why literal rendering is insufficient, and the strategies used to preserve meaning.
Literal translation systematically compressed the moral, spiritual, and relational meanings these terms carry. Meaning was treated through strategies, including thick description, reflexive translation memos, bilingual checking, iterative forward/backward translation, participant clarification, field note triangulation, and a living codebook. The article proposes trustworthiness criteria suited to cross‐language work: credibility, authenticity, coherence, reflexive accountability, contextual fidelity, and reciprocity.
Integrating research from qualitative sociology, linguistics, feminist epistemology, and postcolonial theory, the article foregrounds the power relations structuring cross‐language fieldwork and closes with a framework of 10 methodological recommendations.
This study demonstrates that the primary challenge in translating Indonesian literary works into Arabic lies in the cultural elements embedded in metaphors, proverbs, and local expressions. Employing a qualitative textual analysis of Hamka’s Di Bawah Lindungan Kaʿbah, the research reveals that differences in worldview between Indonesian and Arab societies influence lexical choices and stylistic expressions, making literal translation insufficient. The findings highlight the necessity for translators to grasp the cultural context of the source text to ensure comprehensive meaning transfer. The study contributes to translation studies by formulating strategies that integrate semantic and stylistic approaches, including transliteration with explanatory notes, functional equivalence in the target culture, and the preservation of social metaphors. These strategies prove effective in maintaining cultural authenticity while ensuring readability for Arabic audiences. Overall, the research reinforces the view that literary translation is an act of intercultural mediation, synthesizing linguistic, semantic, and cultural dimensions to preserve meaning, aesthetic nuance, and cultural resonance in the target language.
This qualitative multiple case study explores multilingual postgraduate students’ academic identities through writing at an EMI university in Hong Kong, with a focus on how they gain legitimacy in knowledge‑making with their multilingual repertoires. Grounded in a poststructuralist understanding of identities as fluid and negotiated, the study takes writing as a key site where such identities are continually shaped. Adopting a translingual view, it investigates writing as an emergent meaning‑making process and as the synergy of meaning‐making resources across languages, spaces, and roles. The study gathered data from interview narratives and written artefacts produced by two focal participants, which document their translingual writing practices and the emergence of more legitimate identities in their disciplinary communities. The findings reveal that multilinguals craft fluid identities by drawing on linguistic items, culturally embedded concepts, and locally situated values to revoice legitimate meaning‐making practice. The reconfigured identities afforded them greater legitimacy in disciplinary knowledge‑making and participation. Central to this legitimacy was the balancing and integration of multilingual resources, as writers shifted between local and international discourses to transform perceived linguistic and cultural deficits into epistemic assets in their writing.
Siqi Song, Ken Lau· International Journal of App...· 0 citations
This article explores an ethics of difference for Bible translation, drawing on Lawrence Venuti’s work. I contrast the instrumental view, which conceptualizes translation as neutral meaning transfer, with the contextual view, which recognizes translation as interpretive and culturally embedded, involving both representation and transformation. I advocate for the contextual paradigm. Through examples from biblical texts, such as Hebrew אֱמוּנָה “faithfulness” and Greek πίστις “faith,” I demonstrate how translation choices reflect cultural and theological frameworks. I therefore propose viewing Bible translations as cultural testimonies: unique articulations of God’s revelation within specific cultural contexts. This challenges the historical dominance of European Bibles and calls for greater appreciation of diversity among Bible translations. An ethics of difference requires transparency about operative frames, accountability for translation choices, and critical awareness of power dynamics. Finally, the contextual view reveals a problem with AI-based drafts: Human translators must remain primary decision-makers in this deeply interpretive, culturally embedded task.
Literary translation involves more than linguistic conversion; it also entails the reconstruction and re-encoding of cultural meanings. From the perspective of cultural translation theory, this study takes Liu Cixin’s original Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem and its Spanish translation El problema de los tres cuerpos by Javier Altayó as the objects of analysis. Drawing on Nida’s framework of cultural classification, culturally embedded elements in the source text are grouped into five categories: ecological, material, social, religious-philosophical, and linguistic. Through a comparative reading of the Chinese and Spanish versions, the paper examines the translator’s shifting strategies among foreignization, domestication, and cultural negotiation. The analysis suggests that the translation does not rely on a single or fixed strategy. When dealing with culture-specific elements that carry strong historical or regional specificity, the translator is more likely to preserve foreignness through transliteration, literal translation, or brief explanatory additions. In contrast, for expressions that may hinder comprehension or lead to cultural misinterpretation, freer rendering, generalization, or contextual adjustment tend to be adopted in order to reduce the cognitive burden on target readers. Overall, the Spanish translation of The Three-Body Problem reveals a flexible negotiation process, in which cultural difference is retained to varying degrees while comprehension is facilitated and narrative flow is maintained. This case offers a useful reference for the Spanish dissemination of Chinese science fiction and more broadly for the cross-cultural transmission of heterogenous cultural elements.
Yueyang Zhang· Journal of Language, Culture...· 0 citations
This article examines how Xiangxi folk customs in Shen Congwen’s
The Husband
and
Biancheng
are mediated as forms of local knowledge in English translation. It compares renderings in four publications, which together provide three English versions of each work by Ching Ti and Robert Payne, Gladys Yang, and Jeffrey C. Kinkley. Drawing on Zhong Jingwen’s classification of material, social, linguistic, and spiritual folk customs, this study combines the concepts of local knowledge, intercultural mediation, cultural filtering, and translator ethics. The analysis shows that material customs are often conveyed through literal rendering or functional description, though regional specificity may be reduced. Social customs require the reconstruction of institutional relations; linguistic customs depend on oral form, euphemism, taboo, and shared inference; and spiritual customs rely on coherent relations among ritual objects, actions, sequence, and purpose. Ching Ti and Payne generally favour immediate recognisability, Yang balances narrative fluency with selective clarification, and Kinkley more consistently employs descriptive expansion and paratextual explanation, although greater detail does not always ensure accuracy. These recurrent differences are interpreted as historically situated ethical orientations shaped by anticipated readerships, publishing conditions, and reception contexts. Translation therefore not only conveys Xiangxi culture but also determines how its local knowledge becomes intelligible to English-language readers.
Shan Su· International Journal of App...· 0 citations
This study examined how proverbs in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru reinforce indigenous knowledge and cultural identity in the face of globalisation using the theoretical framework of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) with particular focus on the transitivity system of the experiential ideational meta function. Transitivity is used to examine how language represents human experience through different process types, participants and circumstances. By applying this theory, the study explained how the author used proverbs in her work to encode experiential meanings which reflect the socio-cultural realities of Igbo society. The theory is suitable for this analysis because it relates grammatical choices with meaning, culture and context. It becomes an effective tool for exploring indigenous knowledge and cultural identity in literary discourse. The use of proverbs in the novel is not just a literary device but an important means of transmitting Igbo cultural values, beliefs and social norms. The study adopted both qualitative and quantitative tools in its analysis. Data comprised 26 proverbs randomly and purposively selected from the novel and analysed based on the objectives of the study, research questions and theoretical framework adopted. The study summarily revealed that under the processes, the “material process” occurred majorly and followed by “relational process” (which represents actions and relationships in the Igbo society). Under the participants, it also showed that “actor” occurred highest and followed by “goals” (It represents the characters involved in a discourse). Under the circumstances, “manner” occurred most and followed by “location” (place) and matter (It represents the way of doing things in a given setting or event). The study concludes that lexico-grammatical pattern of proverbs in Efuru contribute significantly to the preservation and promotion of indigenous knowledge and cultural identity.
George Asoegwu· COOU Journal of Arts and Hum...· 0 citations
