Linguistic hospitality and listening through interpreters: critical reflections and
recommendations on linguistic power relationships in multilingual research
Tesseur, WineORCID: 0000-0003-4882-3623
(2022)
Linguistic hospitality and listening through interpreters: critical reflections and
recommendations on linguistic power relationships in multilingual research.
In: Holmes, PrueORCID: 0000-0003-2923-2350, Reynolds, JudithORCID: 0000-0003-3154-4919 and Ganassin, SaraORCID: 0000-0002-0373-542X, (eds.)
The politics of Researching Multilingually.
Multilingual Matters, Bristol, GB, pp. 31-48.
ISBN 9781800410138
This chapter reflects on my experiences of conducting interviews with staff from development
organisations in Kyrgyzstan about the role of languages and culture in their work. These thirty-four semistructured interviews, conducted in January 2018, were collected for a case study as part of a larger project
that aimed to raise the profile of languages in the development sector, and particularly in contexts in which
international NGOs claim to listen to their so-called beneficiaries. The theoretical concept of ‘listening’
was central to the project. In this chapter, I describe how I used the concepts of listening and of linguistic
hospitality (Ricoeur 2006) to reflect on my own linguistic practices as a translation studies scholar, who
visited Kyrgyzstan as an outsider from a privileged background and who did not speak the local languages
but worked with an interpreter. I demonstrate that using these concepts helped me to gain insights into the
personal, institutional and sociopolitical issues that influenced my linguistic choices and assumptions. To
conclude, I offer practical recommendations for researchers that can help in designing, delivering and
reporting on multilingual research in a more linguistically equitable way.
AHRC [AH/M006808/1], Irish Research Council, European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 713279
ID Code:
28276
Deposited On:
20 Apr 2023 15:20 by Thomas Murtagh. Last Modified 20 Apr 2023 15:20