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Richard Fay & Leah Davcheva
Paper for the Paper for the “Doing Research Multilingually”“Doing Research Multilingually” Colloquium at Colloquium at
BAAL Annual Conference, UWE, BristolBAAL Annual Conference, UWE, Bristol
September 3September 3rdrd 2011 2011
Una Pastora ….
Una pastora yo ami A shepherdess I lovedUna ija hermosa A beautiful childDe mi chikes yo l’adori Still so young I adored herMas ke eya no ami More than her I loved no other
Un dia que estavamos One day when we wereEn la huerta asentados Sitting in the gardenLe dishe yo: “por ti mi flor I said to her: “For you
my flowerMe muero de amor”. I will die of love”.
etc
‘Un pastora’, from the album Sentir by Yasmin Levy© 2010, Adama Music and publishing
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Linguistic Identity-Play Amongst Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria: A Narrative Study
… exploration of the narrativised understandings of middle-aged / elderly Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria re Judesmo (Judæo-Spanish and Ladino)
14 storytellers aged between 45 and 92Narrative methodology (involving e.g. restorying)
Collaborative (no explicit researcher hierarchy )
For-pleasure (no funding body or examination body etc)
Intercultural (in process and focus)
Reflexive (reciprocal reflexivity managed through researcher stories - of Ladino experiences and of being researchers)
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Some further methodological aspects
Leah -- Bulgarian, Sephardic, Ladino-memories from childhood, field-based
Richard -- non-Bulgarian, non-Jewish, no Ladino memories, desk-based
…. but shared intercultural, narrative and Balkan cultural interests and research experiences
English-medium communication between us (and many of our audiences)
Bulgarian-medium communication with storytellers
Data generation? Restorying? Data analysis? Data (re)presentation?
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One storyteller --- Reina Lidgi
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Analysis in brief - five zones of identity-play
the (intra-)personal, i.e. a zone of internal dialogue;
the domestic, i.e. a zone for the family (especially relevant during childhood, upbringing etc);
the local, i.e. a zone for the Sephardic community in Bulgaria;
the diasporic, i.e. a zone for the wider Sephardic Jewish community (including mediated modes of communication through literature, newspapers, and journals); and
the international, i.e. the international community of Spanish-speakers.
… as set against the historically-, politically-, culturally-, and societally- changing Bulgarian Sephardic Jewish Ladino-oriented contexts
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English-medium representation of some of the restoried data
Ladino gives me a sense of belonging to something larger. Every so often, it gives me the freedom of choice – I can choose the culture I want to belong to. Even though it is not the language that I use now it just pops up in certain situations and this makes me realise that there’s this language inside me, lurking there, deep inside. [Gredi]
I sometimes wonder about my [Ladino] accent or my intonation – perhaps they bear some Jewish traces and give me away. [Andrey]
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The multilingual research process (1)
Doing research multilingually – research about one Language (Ladino), through stories largely in another (Bulgarian) as largely analysed and (re)presented in a third (English)
Research design/thinking – in English
Researcher stories - Leah in Bulgarian + English, Richard in English
Researcher communication – in English
Data generation (i.e. story-gathering interviews) - in Bulgarian
with occasional words, phrases, proverbs in Ladino – sometimes subconsciously code-switching , others deliberate choice to make a point, provide colour
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The multilingual research process (2)
Restoried interview notes – in Bulgarian, + ‘instrumental’ translations into English polished restoryings in English
Bi-lingual restoried texts -- for Leah to work with
[“the English version is more ‘polished’, the Bulgarian more ‘raw’”]English-medium restoried texts – for Richard to work with
“Richard won’t be able to feel the emotional charge in the original”Authenticity – “Richard actually accesses the stories through
my recordings of them, my translations, restoryings and modifications. It is a not a direct access”.
Analysis – Leah began by analysing the English version and also writing in English about what she learned from this analysis.“…. to make communication between Richard and myself direct, but also I find it easier to write research in English”.
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The multilingual research process (3)
English hegemony? Soni says: “I have a sense of nostalgia because there is an ongoing discourse about the unique value of Ladino and the worth of our Sephardic identity but the whole of [your [academic] conversation is conducted in … English.”
Back translation – “the English version of the analysis and presentation texts will require translation back into Bulgarian when we present the research to audiences in Bulgaria”.
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Some reflections (1)
Richard as outsider – I struggle to identity as strongly (as Leah does) with the storytellers and the affective dimensions of their performances – all I hear is 2nd hand translations!!
Leah as insider – “I seem to have been experiencing the same thing – the stories, my emotions and thoughts and memories - over again, in English this time.”
Leah’s English-speaker identity as a researcher “One of the outcomes of my habit of thinking in and using English professionally is a sense of not being able to express myself well in Bulgarian on the topic. It’s kind of representing the research not doing it. There were moments even, when I felt inferior in my ‘research’ Bulgarian”.
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Some reflections (2)
Leah on collaboration in English - “… a collaborative endeavour between long-time colleagues, friends, enthusiasts, professionals, etc … we naturally see ourselves as peers … I see a link with DRM in that such peer collaboration naturally calls for behaviours of sharing and enabling. One such enabling behavior is making the stories, originally gathered and scripted in Bulgarian, available for Richard, through translation. Another is the naturally occurring process of sharing everything and anything that occurred. The resulting conversations happen in the only language we have between us, i.e. English. Thus, the collaborative spirit and the desire to create as much common ground as possible, foregrounded my speaker-of-English identity. English became the main language in which I ran the research process.
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Value in our multilingual collaboration?Our multilingual research design was directly linked to the
decision to collaboratively research this topic throughout the process, but ….
Leah – “working multilingually meant a very thorough immersion in the data etc, a doubling up of my researcher perspective as it were – but I wish I had been more consistent in working with the languages as I felt my way through the multilingual process”
Richard– “I had thought that a) I would be only an outsider to the researched field and b) translation was necessary to compensate for my lack of Bulgarian, but I now realise that the project had English-medium aspects also because of: c) Leah’s researcher identity in English, and d) insights (from the literature etc) came mostly via English. Also, using two languages to explore / analyse the restoried texts (also in two languages) has perhaps deepened the analytical process , and using English to present our work is also part of the interpretive process. Thus, a multilingual necessity became a multilingual enrichment.
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DRM - Многоезичнo правене на изследванияmnogoezíchno právene na izslédvaniya
When I came to translating the verbal form ‘doing’, nothing sounded 'native'. From a Bulgarian language perspective, it sounded natural using noun phrases only, but I knew we wanted a verb. In the end, my formulation is faithful to the concept, but it sounds 'novel' in Bulgarian. Reflecting on that, I did a (very) quick tour of Bulgarian academic article titles and event titles and I discovered that most of them were made of nouns + adjectives. It could be that Bulgarian academic discourse (as highlighted via titles) foregrounds research products / outcomes. With this Ladino project and DRM methodology focus, we (Richard and I) differ from research making and research reporting practices I am familiar with in Bulgaria, i.e. we pay attention to process.
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