Translations--the Bane of My Existence

I’ve taken 66 interviews total. There might be a 67^th this next week, but I’m pretty much done with the interview phase of my work. Now I have to translate everything. The translation is really rough going. Every once in a while I run across one of my interviews that only ran about 20 or 30 minutes. Those are heaven. I usually translate all of my questions first (I don’t have to be very accurate—just convey the basic meaning so I can understand the context of the answer), and then I can usually quickly translate the answers. Then I hit one of my hour-and-a-half interviews. Those go forever. The real kicker is that the long interviews are almost always more useful. The short ones just kind of confirm what the longer ones say, so I can have an idea of how widely shared certain ideas are. Most of what ends up on the blog comes from the large interviews, and most of those quotes will end up in my dissertation.

The interviews also get harder to translate depending on who transcribes them. If Tynara transcribes, she’s careful to double check everything she writes to make sure she got it right, and she knows grammar and punctuation rules better, so the transcriptions are really easy to read. It gets tough when one of my research assistants does the transcription. They often are actually better at writing in English than in Russian (thank you, internet), and I often have to read their transcriptions twice before I know what to write in English, just because each paragraph is in fact one long sentence. It’s not entirely their fault—people usually don’t speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences—but the purpose of punctuation is to approximate the effect of pauses and intonations and the students just don’t know how to do that.

Oh well. The fact that I don’t have to do the transcriptions myself makes my research infinitely easier than it would have been otherwise, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. I expect to have everything translated by the end of the month.