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Translation in cross-language international business research: Beyond equivalence Author(s): Agnieszka Chidlow, Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki and Catherine Welch Source: Journal of International Business Studies, Vol. 45, No. 5, Special Issue: The Multifaceted Role of Language in International Business: Unpacking the Forms, Functions and Features of a Critical Challenge to MNC Theory and Performance (June/July 2014), pp. 562-582 Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43653820 Accessed: 25-04-2019 06:53 UTC

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A. Journal of International Business Studies (2014) 45, 562-582 © 201 4 Academy of International Business All rights reserved 0047-2506

www.jibs.net

Translation in cross-language international business research: Beyond equivalence

Agnieszka Chidlow1, Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki2 and Catherine Welch3

Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK ; 2 Aristotle University of

Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece; 3 University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Correspondence: E Plakoyiannaki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, School of Economics, Department of Business Administration, Thessaloniki, 54 124, Greece. Tel: +30 2310 996670; Fax: +30 2310 996452; e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

In this paper, we problematise the way translation has been treated in interna- tional business (IB) research. We start by conducting an interpretive content analysis of both qualitative and quantitative cross-language studies published in four core IB journals over the course of a decade. Our analysis shows the dominance of a technicist view of translation associated with the equivalence paradigm. In contrast, we advocate a shift to a more contextualised approach informed by theoretical developments in translation studies. More specifically, we focus on two theoretical perspectives - skopos theory and cultural politics - which offer related but distinct approaches to rethinking equivalence. We conclude by advocating that the translation process be reframed as a process of intercultural interaction, rather than a lexical transfer of meaning. This recon- ceptualisation would, we argue, open up what is currently a "black box" in most IB studies. The contextualised approach that we offer has the potential not just to enrich the findings of studies, but also provide insights that are of multi- disciplinary relevance. Journal of International Business Studies (201 4) 45, 562-582. doi: 1 0. 1 057/jibs.20 1 3.67

Keywords: language (language design, silent language, translation); content analysis; q ua litative/quan titative com pa risons

Received: 7 December 2012 Revised: 10 October 2013

Accepted: 30 October 201 3 Online publication date: 2 January 2014

INTRODUCTION

Language has been described as the essence of human life (Gadamer, 2004): it produces rather than just transmits meaning. In the social sciences, greater awareness of the constitutive role played by lan- guage in society (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000; Deetz, 2003; Iedema & Wodak, 1999) has seemingly not prompted researchers to engage in greater methodological reflection about how to approach cross- language studies (Temple, 2005); that is, studies in which linguistic boundaries are being crossed by the researcher and/or participants. Inattention to the methodological implications of cross-language research was observed early on by Brislin (1970), whose review of 80 articles on cross-cultural psychology found that translation issues were either not mentioned or were under-reported.

There is evidence that this silence about cross-language methodo- logical decisions is not just confined to Brislin's discipline of psychology, and that it persists even in more recent times. For example, Bradby (2002) points to " [sociology's lack of interest in language". Temple and Young (2004: 163) assert that research on minority ethnic communities "is written without any reference to

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563

language issues". Even anthropology, with its focus on in-depth fieldwork, has been accused of treating foreign language interviewing as "a taken for granted issue" (Winchatz, 2006: 84). In this paper, we exam- ine how scholars in international business (IB) have approached cross-language research. Our key research question is: "How do IB authors account for the translation decisions they make in their research?"

This paper draws inspiration from Davis's (1971) seminal insight that challenging assumptions is what makes academic study valuable. We adopt Alvesson and Sandberg's (2011) "problematization methodology" to develop new theoretical insights into translation. This theoretical approach involves identification and critique of the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying a particular theory or domain; and then development of an "alternative assumption ground". Our paper is structured in accordance with these steps. We commence by critically reviewing what, following Pym (2007), we term the "equivalence paradigm", which has domi- nated existing literature on cross-language research methodology in IB. According to this approach, translation is the quest for conveying identical meanings. We then shift from the methodological discussion about equivalence to empirical practice, analysing the approach to translation taken in cross- language studies published over a 10-year period in four IB journals: International Business Review ( IBR ), Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS), Journal of World Business (JWB) and Management Interna- tional Review (MIR). Our evidence highlights that the technicist assumptions of the equivalence para- digm also underlie empirical studies in IB.

Having uncovered the prevailing assumptions in methodological and empirical studies in IB, we then turn to an alternative approach that has emerged in translation studies. While we agree with the need for transparency and rigour when it comes to translation, we argue that this does not require a mechanical process of arriving at the most identical target-language text as possible. Instead, we propose the shift to a more contextualised approach based on theoretical developments in translation studies. We conclude our paper by outlining the implications of such a shift for conducting and reporting on cross- language studies. We argue that adopting a contex- tualised approach to translation would enable researchers to take greater account of the cross- border and cross-cultural differences that are, after all, central to the rationale for IB forming a separate field of enquiry.

THE EQUIVALENCE PARADIGM: THE VIEW FROM CROSS-LANGUAGE METHODOLOGY

The literature on cross-language methodology in IB (and related disciplines in management and market- ing) overwhelmingly adopts what in this paper we (following Pym, 2007) term the "equivalence paradigm". According to this paradigm, the aim of translation is to achieve a text in the target language that is equivalent - that is, of "equal value" (Pym, 2007) - to the original source-language version. A translation is equivalent if it achieves "the convey- ance of identical meaning" (Huit et al., 2008: 1035) between the target and source language versions.1 Consistent with our problematisation objective, in this section we will outline the key assumptions underlying this paradigm, and the dilemmas that can result from the pursuit of equivalence. Given that equivalence implies "equal value", the

quest for equivalence between texts assumes that two languages "do or can express the same values" (Pym, 2007: 272). The complication arising from this assumption - that a word or concept may have a fundamentally different meaning in another lan- guage or be absent altogether, so the relationship between the two languages is asymmetrical - is acknowledged in existing literature, but its implica- tions are often downplayed or sidelined. The most commonly cited method for dealing with non- equivalence remains Triandis's (1976) proposal for research designs incorporating emic (culture-speci- fic) as well as etic (universal) concepts and proce- dures. He reports one such design which began with a pre-test of emic statements, the results of which enabled the development of a culture-specific, lan- guage-specific scale. Translation from one language to another was minimised, surveys were tailored for each country and emic understandings were incor- porated into the survey instrument. Yet while Trian- dis's combined emic/etic designs are well known to IB researchers, they have not been extensively used, with Schaffer and Riordan (2003) finding that 94% of the empirical studies they reviewed took the "imposed etic" approach; that is, assuming that a concept is defined in the same way across cultures. Huit et al. (2008) did not include emic approaches in their review of the empirical literature in IB. In IB and related disciplines, an imposed etic

design is often accompanied by the use of back- translation, which is regarded as the most effective technique for the "establishment" of translation equivalence (see, e.g., Huit et al., 2008: 1035; Peng, Peterson, & Shyi, 1991; Sin, Hung, & Cheung, 2002). Douglas and Craig (2007: 31) note that in

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international marketing, back-translation "is still the primary method used to check translation accu- racy". Their analysis of cross-language studies pub- lished in the Journal of International Marketing from 1993 to 2005 finds that 75% of papers report they used back-translation (compared with 62% in Schaffer and Riordan's review of a different set of

journals). The popularity of back-translation is per- haps not a surprise, given it is grounded in etic assumptions of a symmetrical correspondence bet- ween languages (Douglas & Craig, 2007).

Yet the assumption that back-translation estab- lishes equivalence is questioned by the very author whose seminal paper on back-translation, Brislin (1970), is heavily cited in IB. In this paper, he warns that "a researcher cannot depend solely on the back- translation technique" (Brislin, 1970: 213) and advo- cates that it should be combined with other meth-

ods. He outlines what he regards as the ideal of a multiple-method procedure, which comprises seven steps - only one of which is back-translation.2 In particular, his study finds that a pre-test is "neces- sary" (Brislin, 1970: 212) to eliminate translation errors, even after several rounds of back-translation. Yet Brislin's advocacy of multi-method procedures has been largely overlooked by IB scholars.

Nevertheless, there are indications that in the past decade, a more critical assessment of back-translation can be detected among commentators on survey methodology (Harkness, Villar, & Edwards, 2010), although this trend is rarely reflected in the IB literature (for exceptions, see Douglas & Craig, 2007; Usunier, 2011). Concerns about back-translation are in fact not new, but rather are being rediscovered. Sechrest, Fay, and Zaidi (1972) warned early on about the "paradox" of equivalence: the more equivalent the translation, the less likely it will be that cultural differences will be found (see also Sekaran, 1983). Another common criticism is that back-translation

encourages "a spurious lexical equivalence" (Deutscher, 1973: 167); in other words, it may estab- lish that two words refer to the same object, but this does not necessarily convey the intended meaning of the original text (Peng et al., 1991; see also McGorry, 2000 for an example in an empirical study). Werner and Campbell (1973) suggest that in order for equiva- lent meaning and not just lexical equivalence between source- and target-language versions to be achieved, both versions may need to be modified in the process of translation. While Werner and Camp- bell still operate within the equivalence paradigm, they capture a crucial insight: loyalty to the source version may result in a text that is not easily

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comprehensible in the target language. Their version of back-translation - decentering - avoids source- text dominance by involving several iterations of (back) translation, with the original text as well as the translated version being successively modified.

Instead of back-translation, Harkness et al. (2010: 128) assert that another technique canvassed by Brislin (1970, 1976) should be regarded as the "cur- rently most favoured" approach in survey methodol- ogy (see also Douglas & Craig, 2007): namely, com- mittee or "team translations" involving input from a diversity of individuals, including monolinguals whose assessment of the quality of the translation may well differ from that of bilinguals. The committee approach allows a much more thorough discussion of alternatives and different perspectives, in contrast to back-translation, which Harkness and Schoua- Glusberg (1998: 112) liken to using a metal detector: "It cannot identify what it picks up and, neither, unfortunately, can the monolingual researcher". Ulti- mately, back-translation involves a subjective judge- ment as to whether two versions of a text are

equivalent or not (Sechrest et al., 1972). Given this dependence on judgement, Brislin (1970) and his contemporaries emphasise the importance of careful selection of the people to conduct the translation. In the end, this is what assures the quality of the transla- tion, not the application of specific techniques and mies (e.g., Werner & Campbell, 1973). In the literature on qualitative cross-language

methodology (which is currently largely based in nursing and sociology, with little influence on man- agement research), the equivalence paradigm has also been influential. Squires (2009) lists multiple criteria for evaluating the quality of cross-language qualita- tive research, with conceptual equivalence playing a prominent role in ensuring the trustworthiness of a study: "Maintaining the conceptual equivalence of what a participant said during an interview is ... the most important part of mediating the methodological issues that arise from using translators" [our empha- sis]. Among qualitative researchers, there has also been interest in back-translation as "[t]he most com- mon and highly recommended procedure for trans- lating" (Chen & Boore, 2009: 235). Language dif- ferences are viewed as a technical problem, as a "barrier" to be overcome or at least reduced through the application of rigorous techniques; thus Squires (2009) explicitly uses the phrases "language barrier" and "methodological challenge". To conclude, while equivalence is widely accepted

as the goal of translation, the equivalence paradigm has struggled with the notion of what equivalence

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actually means and how it can be achieved. At its worst, the drive for equivalence can result in a narrow focus on the lexical similarity of texts rather than their meaning, lack of clarity as to how to proceed if there is insufficient correspondence bet- ween two languages, over-zealous fidelity to the source text, inattention to the inescapable subjectiv- ities involved in judging equivalence, over-reliance on back-translation and an underlying positivism which treats language as the neutral transmission of messages. Limitations and assumptions that accom- pany the equivalence paradigm have been acknowl- edged in the literature, although less so in IB, but critics have typically suggested alternative routes to equivalence (e.g., decentering, use of team transla- tions) rather than questioning it as a goal. We now turn to our analysis of empirical cross-language research in IB, in which we find even greater adher- ence to equivalence as the overriding objective.

OUR ANALYTICAL APPROACH In order to examine how IB authors account for their

translation decisions, we conducted an interpretive content analysis3 of published journal articles. Unlike previous treatments of the topic (Huit et al., 2008; Schaffer & Riordan, 2003), our analysis was primarily qualitative, allowing for fine-grained coding, a more holistic interpretation of the meaning of the text, the consideration of context and the possibility of emer- gent insights. It also had a broader scope, covering not only cross-cultural studies, but IB research in general.4 In addition, it was not restricted to quantitative studies but also included qualitative papers, which were excluded from previous reviews.

Content analysis is often regarded as largely a quantitative technique based on the categorisation of various textual features and frequency counts of the resulting categories (Ahuvia, 2001). Yet there has long been recognition that a purely quantitative approach to content analysis is not only restrictive, but can potentially even be misleading as it does not capture the full contextual meaning of texts (Kracauer, 1952). Traditional content analysis distinguishes between "manifest" (literal, surface-level, direct) con- tent and "latent" (implicit, underlying, connotative) content, with the former regarded as more objective and more amenable to quantification (Berelson, 1971). More recently, there has been increasing recog- nition that drawing distinctions between the two types of content is misleading, given that the recep- tion to any content is necessarily interpretive in nature (Ahuvia, 2001). In the current study, we took advan- tage of the interpretive strengths of a more qualitative

approach to content analysis (see also Welch, Piekkari, Plakoyiannaki, & Paavilainen-Mäntymäki, 2011). However, being interpretive is compatible with being systematic (Schreier, 2012), and in the remainder of this section we will detail the multi-stage process we went through to build our interpretation.

A key aspect of every content analysis is the selection of the texts to analyse. In our analysis we employed a purposeful sampling approach in order to increase the information richness and diversity of the investigated texts. Our sample comprises the leading IB-specific journals - IBR, JIBS, JWB and MIR - all of which impose English as the language of dissemination (to use the term suggested by Tietze and Dick, 2009). We chose these four journals because they represent the most highly ranked and specialised IB outlets, thus providing us with an insight into disciplinary practices (DuBois & Reeb, 2000; Piekkari, Welch, & Paavilainen, 2009). Chron- ologically, we followed up the study by Schaffer and Riordan (2003), which examined research in the 1990s. In the time period under investigation (2000-2009), a total of 1440 articles was published in the four journals (Table 1).

Our analysis of the four journals concentrated on empirical quantitative and qualitative articles. As far as quantitative articles are concerned, we analysed only survey-based studies, excluding empirical research based on secondary data or experiments. The reason for this focus is that survey research is not only the most popular form of data collection in IB, but it is also featured in the relevant methodolo- gical literature on cross-language research (e.g., Douglas & Craig, 2007). We commenced the analy- sis by categorising every empirical article (omitting editorials, commentaries and conceptual papers) in the period under investigation based on the type of data collection used by the authors (qualitative and quantitative).5 We then scanned each of these arti- cles to select for further analysis those that were cross-language in nature. Table 1 shows the results of this process: 401 cross-language studies, of which 334 were quantitative (72% of the total number of quantitative survey-based articles) and 67 qualitative (69% of the total number of qualitative articles).6

Having assembled our data set of cross-language empirical papers, we then employed two "cycles" of analysis (Saldafta, 2009), with a different emphasis in each cycle. The first iteration could be labelled "summative" (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005): we recorded and classified all the occurrences in the texts related to translation decisions. We scanned the entire con-

tent of each journal article, although the methods

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Table 1 Categorisation of journal articles 2000-2009

Type of articles journal Total

JIBS IBR IWB MIR

Quantitative survey articles

Quantitative survey articles published(%) 122(26%) 131(28%) 96(2,%) 1 1 3(24%) 462(83%) Quantitative survey cross-language articleS(%) 111(33%) 89(27%) 59(18%) 75(22%) 334(72%)

Qualitative articles

Qualitative articles published(%) 24(25%) 19(20%) 35(36%) 1 9(20%> 97(17%) Qualitative cross-language artides(%) 12(i8%) H(i6%) 29(43%) 15(22%) 67(40%)

Total quantitative survey and qualitative articles 146(26%) 150(27%) 131(23%) 132(24%) 559(39%) Published articles per journal 449(31%) 382(27%) 289(21%) 320(22%) 1440

Note: JIBS = Journal of International Business Studies; IBR = International Business Review, JWB = journal of World Business; MIR = Management International Review.

section of published articles received par- ticular attention because language issues are commonly regarded as a methodological concern (Squires, 2009). Unlike in a quantitative analysis, interpretive content analysis is exploratory and flex- ible: it is both theory and data driven in that the preliminary list of concepts is extended or even challenged in light of new findings (Schreier, 2012). We commenced with, but then supplemented, a coding frame that was based on recommendations of the extant methodological literature on quantita- tive and qualitative cross-language research (e.g., Brislin, 1970; Schaffer & Riordan, 2003; Squires, 2009). 7 In the first analytical cycle we constantly refined and expanded this initial coding frame to reflect the data set and resolved difficulties in its

application to our textual material. At least two of us coded each article, independently at first and then jointly in order to discuss insights and multiple meanings associated with the coding process.

During these multiple rounds of coding, we did not just record and count instances of keywords (e.g., back-translation, equivalence), but we also examined the entire textual segment in which the keywords appeared, allowing us to understand their meaning in context. This holistic treatment allowed us to look at

what was absent and not just what was present in the texts, the way in which particular terms were used, the meanings that authors attached to them, the words associated with key terms (e.g., the way in which "ensure" was coupled with "equivalence") and - critical to our problematisation approach - the assumptions underlying this word usage. The second cycle of analysis could be likened to

what Gephart (1997) has termed "expansion analy- sis". In this cycle, we linked the text segments that

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we had coded to the text's broader linguistic, meth- odological and theoretical contexts. We linked the textual segments we had coded to the linguistic context of the study, as well as to the methodologi- cal literature that the authors cited. Having identi- fied the dominance of the equivalence paradigm in both the empirical and methodological literature, we began a theoretical journey to identify a contrasting paradigm, which took us to the area of translation studies. This stage required a high degree of theore- tical sensitivity (Ahuvia, 2001), as well as reflexive questioning of our own disciplinary assumptions.

Consistent with our approach, we are not claiming our analysis is either objective or the only possible interpretation of our data. Instead, we are claiming it is a plausible interpretation that is based on a careful reading of the texts. Rather than inter-rater reliabil- ity, interpretive content analysis relies on collabora- tive coding (Ahuvia, 2001; Schreier, 2012): this allowed us to check each other's coding for consis- tency, pose rival interpretations and develop an intersubjective understanding. We now turn to the key findings from this interpretive process.

FINDINGS

In this section, we present our findings about how authors report on their translation decisions (for the cross-journal comparison please see the Appendix). We start by discussing what emerged from our analy- sis as an important consideration when making translation decisions: the linguistic context of the study. We distinguish between four types of cross- language study, each of which presents a different context for translation. We then tum to the quanti- tative studies in our data set that mentioned transla-

tion, in which equivalence was the leading concern.

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Authors typically frame equivalence as a straight- forward transfer of meaning that is attainable through the application of the correct technical procedures, foremost among them back-translation. We conclude the section by analysing the qualitative articles, find- ing that, while it was unusual to discuss translation at all, or refer to equivalence directly, authors regard language as a potential barrier and threat to accuracy.

Translation Context: Four Types of Cross-Language Study The cross-language studies in our data set represent diverse linguistic (or translation) contexts. Not only do studies potentially involve multiple national lan- guages, but IB researchers are also investigating a variety of multilingual communities: the multina- tional enterprise (MNE) itself, expatriate communities and MBA classrooms. We differentiated four types of cross-language studies, based on their national scope (single or multiple-country) and the linguistic makeup of the population being studied (mono- or multi- lingual). Table 2 shows the frequency of each type: in descending order, they are Types 3, 1, 2 and 4. In addition, the table displays the extent to which articles in each type raised what we found to be the most common translation-related issues in quantita- tive and qualitative papers. During the course of coding, we also created a fifth "not clear" category for those articles that contained too little information on

the linguistic context of the study to be able to categorise them to a cross-language type.

The first type is a single-country study, conducted in an environment in which English is not an official or widely spoken language. For such a study, the devel- opment of a research instrument typically involves the researcher translating measures from English (if doing quantitative research) or translating an inter- view guide and interview transcripts (if doing qualita- tive research). The choice of language for such a study is usually not stated explicitly, but can be inferred to be the native language of the respondents. Other translation-related issues are not widely addressed either: back-translation in 31% of articles, pilot studies in 31% and the use of reviewers in 29% (see Table 2).

Authors undertaking this type of study are reliant on their own language skills to translate and over- come language differences, unless they employ translators. Pla-Barber (2001) falls into the former camp: a Spanish author surveying Spanish compa- nies in Spain, he was able to use his own language skills to translate questionnaire items from English and the results back into English. In contrast, Jiang and Li (2008) used a translator rather than

translating their survey instrument into German themselves. A qualitative example of a Type 1 study can be found in Gamble (2006: 332), who notes that:

The author's previous experience and facility in Chinese permitted interviews to be conducted on a one-to-one basis without a translator and for them to be transcribed directly by the author during the interview - tape-recording interviews would have inhibited interviewees' readiness to speak openly.

A notable exception to the use of the native language is Nielsen (2007) who, despite the fact that he is a Danish researcher surveying compatriots in Denmark, ran the questionnaire in English. He pro- vides the justification that "language was not a significant barrier to target respondents" (Nielsen, 2007: 347). The unstated assumption is that if possi- ble, it is preferable to conduct the survey in English.

The second type consists of a single-country, cross- language study, in which the researcher is interview- ing or surveying a multilingual population, such as expatriate managers, who are to be found within the boundaries of the same country. Given the linguistic diversity of this kind of sample, inevitably some research participants will be communicating in a non-native language. In order to reduce this num- ber, one option in this type of study is to send out the survey in multiple languages. For example, Shi (2001: 191) provides a brief explanation of the decision to send out a survey targeting foreign invested enterprises in China in Chinese as well as English: "Many managers representing foreign par- ties are local Chinese because of the localization of

managerial personnel ... in recent years". Another option is to use only English to survey

these multilingual communities, with authors assum- ing that respondents had sufficient language ability to participate in the survey. For example, English was chosen by Barner-Rasmussen (2003), despite Finns comprising the majority of the expatriates they were surveying. The authors are aware of the challenge that being surveyed in a non-native language might pose. They note that personally administering the survey provided them with the opportunity to over- come any potential barriers to comprehension caused by the choice of language: "any terms or concepts respondents perceived as unclear during interviewing were explained to them in the language they felt most comfortable with (Finnish, Swedish or English)" (Barner-Rasmussen, 2003: 50). Barner-Rasmussen is, however, a rare exception in explicitly discussing the complexities of surveying a multilingual popula- tion; overall, articles in this type do not emphasise translation-related issues (see Table 2).

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569

The third type of study is a cross-country, cross- language study in which participants eue surveyed in multiple languages, most commonly their own national languages. This requires the translation of the research instrument into multiple languages; or, if a qualitative project, a bilingual researcher or multi- lingual research team. An example of a large-scale Type 3 study is Waldman et al. (2006), who surveyed culture and leadership in 15 countries as part of the GLOBE study. Moore (2003), in contrast, used a fine- grained ethnographic approach in her study span- ning two countries. She was able to rely on her own language skills to use German when conducting interviews in the head office, supplementing her observations in the London subsidiary. Type 3 articles are the most likely to mention back-translation (Table 2), although their use of pilot studies and reviewers does not differ markedly from Types 1 and 2.

The fourth and final type we identified is a cross- country, cross-language study in which a language - almost always English - is used as the lingua franca in the study. Here, the participants in the research are required to bridge the language divide, rather than the research team. The implications of this are usually not addressed in such studies. Overall, a widespread assumption prevails in our data set - among both qualitative and quantitative researchers - that global managers are competent English speak- ers. If a survey is being conducted in the MNE, it is typically carried out in English, with no accompany- ing discussion as to whether this choice matched the language abilities and preferences of respondents, or whether it may have led to poorer quality responses than if the respondents had been surveyed in their native language. Pilot studies and reviewers are also seemingly not routinely used to check the language abilities of respondents (see Table 2). There are a few exceptions to this trend. Some

authors explicitly provide an assessment of their respondents' language abilities. For example, Zhou, Brown, Dev, and Agarwal (2007: 309) comment that the managers in international hotel chains whom they surveyed "are generally fluent in English (the lingua franca of the hotel industry) and often speak multiple languages". Venaik, Midgley, and Devinney (2004: 3) go one step further to suggest that translation and measurement equivalence were not challenges faced in their research project given the cosmopolitan nature of their sample:

Whether the same measures can be applied across respon- dents from different countries would be debatable were we

interviewing consumers in less-developed countries. How- ever, as our respondents were senior managers, mostly

university educated, speak English, travel widely and have been exposed to the business concepts incorporated in our measures, this issue was of less concern.

Another initiative that we found, both in Types 2 and 4, is for authors to check in advance that it would be viable to send out the survey in English. Thus Shay and Baack (2004: 223) state that "Corpo- rate officials from the participating organisations confirmed that all potential respondents possessed a working knowledge of written and spoken English, thereby supporting the use of English-only instru- ments". "Working knowledge" covers a wide range of fluency levels, of course. However, it does mean that even though the authors did not conduct a pilot test, they were able to receive some verification of the language abilities of respondents.

In conclusion, each cross-language type that we identified represents a different set of translation con- texts. For Types 1 and 3 studies, the choice of language was usually the obvious one - the national language or languages of the informants - and the burden of translation was placed on the researchers, in that the research instrument for the study would need to be translated into the local language(s) and the results translated back into English for the purpose of report- ing. Types 2 and 4 studies were more complex given the linguistically diverse nature of the sample. Here, there was a tendency to opt for English, pushing the responsibility for translation on to respondents. One of the key decisions that a researcher potentially makes is therefore not just how but whether to translate at all - or to avoid translation and assume

that the language of IB is English. In the next section, we move to a discussion of those quantitative studies in which translation was undertaken.

Quantitative Research: Back-Translation and Equivalence We found back-translation to be the technique most commonly mentioned in association with equiva- lence (or "consistency", which is used as a syno- nym). Equivalence is in turn associated with (or even interchangeable with) accuracy, validity, reliability and quality. Authors assume that equivalence of meaning is achievable, although what constitutes equivalence is usually not made clear. There is some evidence that authors do not necessarily use the term in a uniform manner: Does equivalence entail that meanings are "the same" in the two lan- guages (Brouthers, 2002), or just "similar" (Arenš & Brouthers, 2001: 386)? Marshall (2003: 431) specifies that "equivalency, rather than exact translation was

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sought"; whereas Jiang and Li (2008: 370) assert that equivalence procedures allowed them to arrive at "precise meaning". The concern with equivalence is in line with the

literature on cross-language methodology. However, authors go even further in their claims than does this literature, and portray back-translation as a guarantee of equivalence. The following quotations illustrate this amplification:

Back translation was used to ensure the equivalence of mean- ings. (Nguyen, Barrett, & Fletcher, 2006: 688; our emphasis)

The English version of these questionnaires was translated into Spanish in Mexico City and then back-translated ... to ensure construct and functional equivalence. (Athanassiou, Critteden, Kelly, & Marquez, 2002: 143; our emphasis)

the questionnaire ... was then backtranslated into English to ensure the original meanings of the English version remained intact. (Brouthers & Xu, 2002: 664; our emphasis)

As these quotes suggest, "ensure" (or occasionally "assure" or "secure") was the most frequently used word when associating back-translation with equiva- lence. This contrasts with more modest assertions, such as that of Luthans and Ibrayeva (2006: 98), who prefer to state that back-translation was conducted in order

"minimize" the problems related to "the transfer to other cultures and languages of the meaning and intent of standardized scales". The claim that back-

translation ensures equivalence would be contested by Brislin (1970) himself, who emphasises that much depends on the quality of the back-translation process and its pairing with other procedures. He wams that on its own, an identical source- and target-language ver- sion only "suggests" equivalence (Brislin, 1970: 186). Researchers would need to provide evidence for the quality of the back-translation before making any claim as to the degree of equivalence achieved. Instead, in our data set of quantitative papers, back-translation is regarded as in and of itself a form of quality assurance.

Accompanying this confidence in back-translation is the tendency to regard language differences as an error that can be eliminated or at least contained:

The survey was translated and back-translated to prevent any distortions in meaning across cultures where necessary. (Robertson, 2000: 259; our emphasis)

The survey instrument was translated by native speakers and then backtranslated as means of identifying potential termi- nology problems. (Huit, Keillor, & Hightower, 2000: 210-211; our emphasis)

These distortions are, moreover, not regarded as creating a serious dilemma, and only rarely are

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readers informed of changes that were made in response to translation checks such as back-transla- tion. Instead, Wong, Ngo, and Wong (2006: 349) report that the original and back-translated English versions "revealed no substantial differences in the

meanings of the items". Just as Brislin's cautionary view of back-translation

is mostly not heeded - despite the fact that he is the most widely cited methodological authority in our data set - neither is his recommendation that back-

translation be combined with other techniques. Instead, the assumption on the part of the majority of authors appears to be that back-translation is in itself sufficient. A third of the papers that used back-translation accompanied this procedure with a pilot study of the translated instrument, while 39% mention that they had the translated ques- tionnaire reviewed by parties other than the trans- lators. Only in 18 studies do authors state they combined back-translation with a pilot study and the use of independent reviewers. The committee approach is mentioned in only four studies. The drive for equivalence and comparability perhaps explains why we found only one example of authors who explicitly claim to have included a modest "ernie" pre-study to understand local meaning and interpretations before running a sur- vey (Styles, Patterson, & Ahmed, 2008).

As well as the authors in our data set deviating from Brislin's recommendation of a multi-method

approach to achieve equivalence, they also do not attach the same importance as he does to the quality of the translator. Slightly more than half of those who report they conducted a back-translation do not then mention anything about a translator at all, who becomes invisible:

A survey questionnaire was developed in English, translated into Chinese, and subjected to a backtranslation procedure. (Luo, 2002: 173)

Back translation was performed on each local language instrument until conceptual and functional equivalence had been achieved. (Kotabe, Teegen, Aulakh, Coutinho de Arruda, Santillán-Salgado, & Greene, 2000: 130)

The initial study instrument was blind translated into local languages and back into the original English. (Dmitrovic, Vida, & Reardon, 2009: 528)

The back-translation process is therefore divorced from human judgements, subjectivities and prefer- ences. The use of the passive voice, combined with the absence of human agency, evokes a mechanical and objective procedure.

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Of the articles that provide some details about the translators, most refer to the translators in extremely general terms and are not explicit about their qual- ifications for the role. An example can be seen in Zeugner-Roth, Diamantopoulos, and Montesinos (2008: 587), who state that their survey was trans- lated by "native speakers" and back-translated by "experts of the English language". In some papers, it is simply noted that the translators were "bilingual natives" (Lindquist, Vida, Plank, & Fairhurst, 2001: 510) or "competent bilinguals" (Leung, Zhu, & Ge, 2009: 88), which does not provide meaningful infor- mation given that it can be safely assumed that a translator would be bilingual. It is rarely clarified if the translator possessed not just linguistic expertise, but also the necessary level of content knowledge and familiarity with the context being studied.

We came across two papers in which the limita- tions of the back-translation technique are openly acknowledged, and additional steps were taken to achieve equivalence. In the first paper, three MBA students with appropriate language abilities were hired to review the back-translations, with a fourth expert resolving the more serious issues "in consulta- tion with the people who had translated and back- translated the concept in question" (Elenkov & Manev, 2009: 363). Reviewers were "instructed to be essentially concerned with the actual meaning of the concepts to be translated and not so much with the exact phrasing used in the translation/back- translation process". In the second study, the short- comings of back-translation are used as the argu- ment as to why a committee approach was selected:

The linguistic equivalence of our measures was established through the use of translation-back-translation procedures .... The method used was not a mechanical back translation

procedure of first having one person translate from English to the native language, then another from the native language back to English. Rather, the procedure used was to discuss each question and the alternatives in a small group of persons fluent in both languages. Discussion occurred until agreement was reached as to the linguistic equivalence of the questions in both languages. (Harpaz, Honig, & Coetsier, 2002: 236)

Given that the limitations of back-translation are

not widely recognised, it is perhaps not surprising that few authors report taking steps to check for or improve comprehension in the data collection or analysis phases. One way to improve the chances that the research instrument is meaningful to parti- cipants was to switch from a mail to telephone or personally administered survey. For example, Wright, Filatotchev, Buck, and Bishop (2002: 171)

explain that pilot testing of the survey alerted them to the fact that it was not well comprehended in all of the target countries. This insight allowed them to administer the questionnaire by means of face-to- face interviews in order to improve comprehension:

During the piloting stage, the questions proved to be easily understood by Russian managers, who generally gave full and realistic responses. In Belarus and Ukraine, managers seemed rather unfamiliar with Western terminology and it was decided to conduct face-to-face interviews.

Other than switching to the use of personal inter- views, there are also four sets of authors who men- tion scalar equivalence (Ellis, 2007; Lenartowicz & Johnson, 2002; Lee, Hui, Tinsley, & Niu, 2006), two who checked how language may have affected the results as part of the process of data analysis (Delerue & Simon, 2009; Zeybek, O'Brien, & Griffith, 2003) and three who discuss the limitations of the study due to translation issues (Bstieler & Hemmert, 2008; Davis & Meyer, 2004; Lindquist et al., 2001).

Qualitative Research: Mostly Silent on Language Our overarching finding is that IB researchers con- ducting qualitative cross-language research largely do not account for their translation decisions in

their reporting. In fact, none of the investigated papers refers to, or incorporates the insights of, the relevant methodological literature for conducting cross-language research (e.g., Squires, 2009). This lack of sensitivity to language is rather paradoxical given Polkinghorne's (2005: 135) description of qualitative research as "languaged data". It also does not reflect the complexity of a qualitative research project, in which multiple translation decisions are faced: producing a target-language version of the interview guide, conducting the interview, transcrib- ing the interview, analysing the data and reporting interviewee quotations in the publication (Welch & Piekkari, 2006). While we cannot explain this silence without

having interviewed the authors concerned, a num- ber of possibilities can be suggested. The first is that qualitative researchers lack the standardised proce- dures that are available to quantitative researchers. In fact, quantitative researchers sometimes refer to commonly accepted practice as a way of legitimising their use of back-translation, which they describe as "widely recognized" (Luthans & Ibrayeva, 2006: 98), "standard" (Hui, Au, & Fock, 2004: 52) or "conven- tional" (Lin, 2005: 231). In contrast, qualitative researchers - at least in IB - do not have such well- established conventions to follow.

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Another possible reason for the silence about language is that typically qualitative researchers (seemingly) relied on their own language skills dur- ing fieldwork. These language skills would mostly not be mentioned directly. This is in keeping with existing conventions for scientific reporting, in which the researcher's own identity and role in the study are omitted. While many qualitative research- ers recommend greater reflexivity when it comes to reporting (Haynes, 2012), such a trend was not found in our data set. A similar silence prevails when it came to the role of the translator/interpreter, in the four cases in which they were used - despite the fact that in two of these studies researchers relied on

a company interpreter. Given the overall inattention to language issues, it

does not come as a surprise that qualitative research- ers do not make claims of a study's equivalence. We found only a single article that explicitly mentions equivalence of concepts across contexts. Witt and Redding (2009) explore the thinking of senior execu- tives of leading German and Japanese firms about the ideal structure of the economy. The concept of "senior executive", of critical importance to their study, was adjusted to the local contexts:

Our definition of "senior executive" varied slightly to allow for the difference in governance structures between Germany and Japan. In Germany, we defined senior executives to include active or recently retired management and super- visory board members. In Japan, we defined senior executives as active or recently retired management board members. (Witt & Redding, 2009: 867)

Nonetheless, all cross-language studies that men- tion translation decisions conform to the assump- tions of the equivalence paradigm - despite its underlying positivist assumptions - in that their concerns centre on the accuracy of translation, with language considered a barrier to the validity of the study.

In 12 papers, translation - of the interview guide, of the interview transcripts or use of an interpreter during the interview - is mentioned. In three papers, authors explicitly state that they used back-transla- tion. Buckley, Clegg, and Tan (2003), who investi- gated the reform of Chinese state-owned enterprises, developed an English-language version of the inter- view questionnaire as a first step. The questionnaire was carefully translated into Chinese and then back- translated into English, "as suggested by Brislin (1970)", in order to "verify the content consistency between the two versions of the questionnaire" (Buckley et al., 2003: 77; see also Buckley, Clegg, &

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Tan, 2006). Zhu (2009: 233) back-translated inter- view transcripts "in order to ensure preciseness of translation".

Some authors mention the language of the inter- view, but because of the use of the passive voice do not make it clear whether it was the author who

conducted the interview or not. Of the 10 who did, most simply mention the language facility of the author(s), without elaborating any further. An exception can be found in Chapman, De Mattos, Clegg, and Buckley (2008: 222), who acknowledge the relevance of the researcher's identity and view it as either a facilitator or barrier - depending on circumstances - during the interview:

The impact of the nationality of the interviewer (i.e., Polish) on the richness of the material coming from the interviews also needs to be addressed here .... This research was con-

cerned with how the Germans and the British viewed the

Poles, and how the Poles viewed the Germans and the British. Speaking about this to Poles, meant the interviewer and interviewee shared a common background, however, speaking about this to Germans, meant speaking to people that had every reason to be highly sensitive about the legitimacy of their opinions. Every effort was made, however, to create an atmosphere of cooperation with the interviewees.

The study by Tsang (2001) on foreign-invested enterprises in China was conducted in English, Mandarin or Cantonese. The author, who is bilin- gual in English and Chinese, handled all the inter- views, and managed to establish a good rapport with the respondents by communicating in their native languages. Tsang also takes the next step of attempt- ing to maintain the richness of the Chinese inter- views by using native expressions throughout the discussion of the findings (for another example of the use of native expressions, see Ghauri & Fang, 2001). Reflexivity about the role of the researcher and the preservation of original phrases both suggest an alternative approach to translation, which we explore further in the next section.

DISCUSSION: BEYOND EQUIVALENCE Our analysis of IB journals has shown that while researchers often do not feel the need to make their

translation decisions explicit, those who do tend to invoke equivalence and characterise language differ- ences as a problem that can be controlled through the application of suitable techniques, notably back- translation. In this section, we take the next step in problematisation and propose a different way for- ward. We follow the advice of other methodologists (e.g., Harkness et al., 2010; Wong & Poon, 2010) and turn to translation studies in order to develop an

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alternative assumption ground for conceptualising translation. Translation studies, while under-utilised in IB (for a notable exception see Janssens, Lambert, & Steyaert, 2004), are the scholarly field that has conducted the most sustained debate about equiva- lence. Since the 1980s, a paradigmatic shift in trans- lation theory has taken place to a more contex- tualised and socioculturally oriented conception of the translation process. This shift away from equiva- lence to contextualisation is based on reframing translation as a form of intercultural interaction, rather than a lexical transfer of meaning. While theoretical approaches to contextualisation have proliferated in translation studies, along with a multitude of philosophical and disciplinary orienta- tions (e.g., postmodernism, postcolonialism, dis- course analysis and cultural studies), these diverse perspectives nonetheless converge on the need to go beyond the equivalence paradigm. They concur with the limitations of the equivalence paradigm that have already been voiced by those working within this tradition, but also go beyond them.

In this section, we will outline the alternative assumptions underlying this paradigmatic shift, which has been dubbed the "cultural turn" in trans-

lation studies (Bassnett & Lefevere, 1990; Brisset, 2010), and their implications for how researchers approach cross-language research. Our purpose is not to provide an overview of all the authors and theoretical perspectives contributing to the critique of the equivalence paradigm. Instead, we concen- trate on two: skopos theory (Reiss & Vermeer, 1984) and cultural politics (Venuti, 1993, 2008), which offer related but distinct approaches to rethinking equivalence. Skopos theory was one of the earliest challenges to the equivalence paradigm and remains the most comprehensive in its proposal for an alter- native assumption ground for translating all types of texts, including non-literary texts. Venuti's (1993) conceptualisation of translation as a form of cultural politics reflects more recent philosophical develop- ments, notably poststructuralism and postcolonial- ism, and is the more critical of the two perspectives. While Venuti's theory was developed based on the translation of literary texts, it has also been applied to cross-language research methodology by qualita- tive researchers who reject the positivist conception of language as a "neutral component of communica- tion through which researchers obtain information" (Hennink, 2008: 22; see also, e.g., Esposito, 2001; Larkin, Dierckx, & Schotsmans, 2007). We draw on this methodological literature to develop our impli- cations for IB research.

Contextualising Translation: The "Cultural Turn" in Translation Studies

According to skopos theory, translation is a form of communicative interaction (e.g., Snell-Hornby, 1988), rather than a narrow linguistic transfer. The notion of an interaction puts human agency and subjectivity at the centre. Translational interaction is initiated by the person or organisation who engages a translator (with the initiator also possibly being the translator) in order to complete a specific commis- sion or assignment. The translational task starts with the translator's understanding of the source text - with the target audience then in turn producing their own understanding of the translated text (Vermeer, 1998). These textual understandings are time- and place-bound: Reiss and Vermeer (1984) reject the notion of "the source text", arguing that it can only ever be "a" source text which is read and translated in a particular way at a particular point in time. Translation is therefore an interpretive and hermeneutic activity. Both source and target texts have the status of an "offer", which the audience may not receive as intended or anticipated.

Translational action is purposeful, with this pur- pose or skopos (oKOJtóç) shaped by the translator's interpretation of the commission, as well as his/her expert judgement as to what will function best in the target culture (Vermeer, 1998). Assessing the quality of the translation is a matter of assessing whether this communicative purpose is achieved. A quality translation is one which is adequate to its purpose and "transmitted in a target-culture-adequate way" (Vermeer, 1998) - not one which is most alike the source text (unless fidelity to the original is the commission that the translator is seeking to fulfil). As House (2006: 356) proposes, translation can be viewed as a process of recontextualisation; that is, "taking a text out of its original frame and context and placing it within a new set of relationships and culturally conditioned expectations". Moreover, given the context dependence of the production and reception of texts, there can be no optimal or correct translation. Ultimately, the judge of whether the translation has achieved its purpose is the target audience (Nord, 1997).

Once equivalence is no longer the main objective, the source text is "dethroned", to use Vermeer's (1998: 52) term. This does not mean that equiva- lence is irrelevant, but it is a secondary concern, and potentially one that leads to poor results: "A 'faith- ful' translation of a source text can lead to an

'unfaithful' target text" (Vermeer, 1998: 44); that is, one that is not adequate to its skopos. Reiss and

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Vermeer (1984) also stress, along with other transla- tion scholars, that it is not possible to produce a target-language text that is fully equivalent in all its features: not just the lexical equivalence favoured by back-translation, but also grammatical, stylistic, pragmatic equivalence and even equivalence of reader response (see, e.g., Baker, 1992 for different types of equivalence). In the end, the translator must decide which aspects of the source text can or should be rendered faithfully in the target text. Vermeer (1998) argues that more fundamental than the lin- guistic features of the text is its "cultural" level. Meaning is ultimately cultural in nature, so unavoid- ably changes its value when it is transmitted from one culture to another (Reiss & Vermeer, 1984).

In place of the source text, skopos theory elevates the role of the translator, who is ultimately the one to balance and adjudicate the multiple considera- tions involved in the translation process. In this process, the translator brings to bear his/her own worldviews and experiences, translational norms and preferred strategies, understanding of the source and target culture, and perceptions of the transla- tional situation. Venuti's (2008) cultural politics perspective similarly agrees that the translator is not a neutral transmitter of the meaning of the source text, but rather is the active co-producer of the target text. Meaning is subjective and words are polyse- mous: the original source text "is the site of many semantic possibilities that are fixed only provision- ally in any one translation, on the basis of varying cultural assumptions and interpretive choices, in specific social situations, in different historical peri- ods" (Venuti, 2008: 13).

However, Venuti (2008) goes further by exposing the political nature of a translator's co-production. He traces how in the West (or at least, the Anglo- sphere) translation has been practised as a form of appropriation that erases the foreign and denies difference. He argues that the dominant translation

style valorises fluency, intelligibility and readability; in other words, the foreign is "domesticated" and made to appear familiar because any potentially discordant foreign elements have been expunged. The end result of the translation process is "an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to receiv- ing cultural values" (Venuti, 2008: 15). Domestica- tion can be linked to the colonial project of expropriation and cultural dominance; in this way, translation is inescapably a political exercise.

Instead, Venuti makes a case for what he calls a foreignising approach to translation. In this approach, the reader from the target culture is con- fronted head on by the Otherness of the text. The translator is not smoothing over differences, but rather is deliberately "disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the translating language" (Venuti, 2008: 15). A quality translation, in this view, is one which is able to preserve the foreignness of the text in such a way that challenges the receiving culture. Translation is not about finding similarities; rather, the translator has an ethical and political responsi- bility to respect and voice the Other. A translator can achieve this by borrowing words from the source language, retaining syntactical and stylistic features of the original text even if they deviate from target- language conventions, and preserving culturally specific references even though they are alien to the target audience (Van Poucke, 2012).

Contextualisation approaches, such as skopos and cultural politics theories, challenge key assumptions of the equivalence paradigm regarding the aim of translation, the role of the translator, the assessment of translation quality, the nature of meaning and the role of the translator (see Table 3). The equivalence paradigm is predicated on the possibilities of the translator-as-technician reproducing as close a copy of the original as possible and transferring meaning across languages and cultures without changing it. Underlying this view of translation is the positivist

Table 3 Equivalence paradigm and contextualisation approaches compared

Key assumption Equivalence Skopos Cultural politics

Translation aim Transfer of source text Achievement of communicative purpose Exposure of reader to source culture

Evaluation of translation Is it faithful to the Is it functionally adequate in the target Does it represent the Other? quality original? culture? View of meaning Invariant Culturally embedded Subjective Role of translator Technician Cross-cultural expert Co-producer Paradigmatic basis Positivism Hermeneutics Poststructuralism,

postcolonialism

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assumption of an objective, mle-bound process of linguistic transfer. As we have outlined, skopos and cultural politics theories challenge each of these points. They reject the notion of an unproblematic transfer between languages and cultures, emphasise the culturally dependent nature of meaning, set up alternative criteria for evaluating the quality of a translation and adopt an expanded view of the translator's role. They both reject the notion of translation as a quasi-scientific process executed by means of technical procedures such as back-transla- tion. Where they differ is in Venuti's emphasis on the inescapably political nature of the translator's role, and the resulting ethical obligations to repre- sent the Other to the target culture.

Implications for IB We would argue that the alternative assumption ground of translation studies provides far-reaching implications for research practice in IB. Once equiva- lence is no longer the primary goal, the translator is not involved in a technical exercise of word substitu-

tion. Instead, translation is a decision-making pro- cess involving the researcher (as client) and the translator. Accordingly, documenting and account- ing for the choices that the researcher and translator have made become a central methodological task - something that we found to be rare among the articles we analysed. These decisions cover both fieldwork and the writing up of the study, and include whether to translate, which language(s) to use in the study, what is the translation purpose, the approach to translation to be taken and how to report on translation in the write-up of the study. As contextualisation approaches would suggest, these decisions all need to be made with reference

to the translation context of the study - which, as we have seen, can vary considerably in IB research. The initial decisions are made by the researcher:

whether to translate at all or to use a lingua franca; and if a decision is made to translate, which lan- guage^) should be used and whether a translator will be commissioned. If the researcher decides to initiate

a commission, he or she not only needs to decide how many translators to use and how to select them, but also needs to follow up by agreeing on a detailed brief so the translator is knowledgeable about the translational purpose. Translational strategies and communicative priorities need to be agreed upon upfront, but also negotiated, adjusted and discussed during the course of the commission through a dia- logic process. Together, researcher and translator(s) need to resolve how to balance the need to produce

a research instrument that is related to the original, yet is meaningful in the target culture. Equivalence is unlikely to be the translational purpose because, as Harkness et al. (2010) point out, research instru- ments such as surveys should not come across as translations, so above all need to be carefully con- textualised into the target culture in order to be intelligible to respondents.

Given the centrality of the client-translator rela- tionship and the translational decisions they make, we would suggest that rather than using a procedure such as back-translation as supposed evidence of the quality of the translation it would be more mean- ingful to outline and provide a brief justification of the translational approach and translator's qualifications. In short, this would make the translator visible in researchers' accounts (Edwards, 1998). As Temple and Edwards (2002) argue, the concept of reflexivity - the researcher's sensitivity towards how his or her identity and role have affected the findings - needs to be extended to the involvement of the translator/inter- preter. They argue that a cross-language study should include an explicit discussion of "the social location" of the translator and how this affected the process and outcome of translation. Reflexivity also applies if the researcher is responsible for his or her own transla- tions (as was the case in many quantitative and the overwhelming majority of qualitative studies in our review). In such instances, Temple (1997) argues that reflexivity involves a form of "intellectual autobiogra- phy"; in other words, the researcher needs to be transparent about how his or her personal experiences and world views shape word choices.

We would argue that Venuti's (1993) framing of translation as cultural politics also has profound implications for the reporting of research findings. As a discipline, IB has pursued sameness rather than difference due to the dominance of imposed etics, the pursuit of equivalence and the "hegemonic" rise of English (Tietze & Dick, 2009). The ease with which difference is erased has been noted by Xian (2008), who reflects that it was impossible to convey the culturally specific meanings of her interviews with Chinese women at the same time as conform-

ing to the style of English-language academic jour- nals. A false sense of sameness was produced that potentially diminishes the richness and novelty of the research findings. Preserving native expressions in the text - which was pursued by some of the authors in our study - has been suggested as one "foreignising" strategy to avoid losing the meaning of terms that do not have an equivalent in the target language or have culturally specific associations that

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are important to the research (Muller, 2007). Even if English is the language for reporting research results, it is still imperative to acknowledge the multilingual background of the text and inform the reader about linguistic ambiguities and complexities (Steyaert & Janssens, 2013).

Once conceived as a situated process of (recon- structing meaning, translation is no longer just a hurdle to overcome when collecting data - the pro- cess also becomes data and a potential source of theoretical insight. To paraphrase Usunier (2011), language goes from being a constraint to being a resource. The inextricable connection between text

and context becomes a way to reach greater under- standing of respondents, with insights from the translation process something that could usefully be treated as data and written up as part of the findings. As Brislin (1970) recognised over 40 years ago, see- mingly technical procedures such as back-translation and pilot testing can be the source of additional insights and of additional lines of enquiry. In this way, translation needs to be recognised as more than a concern to be addressed in the methodology sec- tion, but rather as an act of knowledge production to be reflected on in the findings of the study.

CONCLUSION

Most of the IB studies published in the four core IB journals from 2000 to 2009 are cross-language in nature. Yet we have shown that current practice in IB research has not gone beyond a narrow technicist approach that prioritises the achievement of equiva- lence. Few articles go beyond a cursory reference to back-translation. Instead, we found that authors assumed that translation/back-translation achieves the transfer of meaning from one language to another. These assumptions, we found, run contrary to the nuances found in Brislin's own work, more recent advances in survey methodology and devel- opments in translation studies.

Our broader review of relevant literature in research

methodology and translation studies allowed us to problematise the concept of equivalence and suggest a way forward for the IB field in the future. We would argue that the alternatives to traditional notions of equivalence allow translation to be seen as more than a procedural step to be reported in the methodology section of a paper. Rather than language being reduced to a technical procedure that is briefly dealt with in the methodology section, the cross-language encounter should permeate the entire paper. The process of translation can itself be treated as data and the source of contextual insights and conceptual

journal of International Business Studies

understanding. Yet these insights are almost never reported in IB studies. We advocate that this process should not remain a "black box" but rather be opened up for analysis and reflexivity. However, this entails a reorientation of the IB field so that it places greater value on the representation and understanding of differences, and of context specificity rather than universality.

The conceptualisation and problematisation of the translation process that we have developed in this paper suggest it is not the mechanistic application of a lexical rulebook, but rather a highly situated and context-bound practice. It consists of multiple deci- sion points and is dependent on the subjectivities and interpretations of the individuals concerned. In order to create a meaningful text, the translator needs to work with and achieve a resolution of multiple com- municative tensions: between source and target cul- tures, between fidelity to the original and intelli- gibility to the reader, between sameness and differ- ence, between domestication and foreignisation, and so on. Once this more complex view of translation is adopted, it assumes greater importance in the research process and is deserving of greater attention in journal articles. Only if translation is seen as a neutral transmission device, as in the equivalence paradigm, is it regarded as not worthy of treatment in the reporting of a study. In contrast, we would argue that IB research necessarily is about translation. Its rationale as a distinct field is that it is about

crossing different national boundaries, language, cul- tures and life worlds - even when a common lan-

guage is used (see also Janssens et al., 2004). If IB researchers paid greater attention to language,

they would potentially not just enrich their own studies, but also provide insights that are of multi- disciplinary relevance. As we found in our analysis, IB researchers are often operating in highly multi- lingual contexts which are still not well understood even in fields such as translation studies. In these

"in-between spaces", in which hybrid forms of lan- guage develop and a high degree of linguistic impro- visation can often be seen, we would anticipate that there is considerable potential for novel theorising. In this paper, we hope to have contributed to such a future research agenda, in which language is regarded not as a barrier to, but rather as a source of, theoretical insight.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank Mona Baker and Elpida Loupaki for sharing their expertise in translation studies - although any remaining errors are our own doing. We

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are also grateful to Jacqueline Mees-Buss, Denice Welch, Lawrence Welch and Paul Downward for their insightful and timely feedback. We received useful comments from presentations at the Graduate School of Management, St Petersburg, and the 201 3 annual meeting of the Academy of International Business in Istanbul. We also acknowledge the Editor, Susanne Hetze, and three reviewers for their constructive com- ments on our manuscript.

NOTES

1 Craig and Douglas, in their influential text published in 2000, define equivalence or comparability as having "the same meaning or interpretation", in line with Huit et al. (2008), but add the proviso "as far as possible" (1 41 ).

The steps are: rewriting the original text to make it more "translatable"; hiring translators with content- specific knowledge as well as linguistic expertise; conducting a back-translation; having the translation independently reviewed; pre-testing the instrument on a target-language population and then on bilinguals, one group of which receives the original and the other the translated version; to check that responses are similar across both groups; and formally reporting the degree of no-error standard that has been achieved.

3"lnterpretive content analysis" is also variously termed "interpretive textual analysis" (Gephart, 1 997), "qualitative content analysis" (Schreier, 2012) and "qualitative textual analysis" (Seale, 2003).

4We should also clarify that while we acknowledge the recent growth in papers on language policies and practices in the MNE (e.g., Peltokorpi and Vaara, 201 2; Piekkari, Welch, Welch, & Peltonen, 201 3), our purpose in this paper was not to review this literature, but to examine the use of translation across all topics pub- lished in IB journals.

5We found that mixed-method (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) papers were primarily quantitative in nature. These papers described the qualitative study only briefly and did not present and discuss any quali- tative findings (for a similar finding, see Hurmerinta- Peltomäki Sc Nummela, 2006). For this reason we included them in the group of quantitative studies.

WVe cannot exclude the possibility that the number of (quantitative and qualitative) cross-language studies was actually higher; however, we could only judge this criterion on the basis of what the authors have

themselves explicitly mentioned. In the end, we went with the authors' explicit claims.

Specifically, we coded quantitative papers for language choice, (back) translation, pilot-testing of the study's instrument, reviewers, discussion of equivalence and use of translators (see, e.g., Brislin, 1 970). We coded qualitative papers for choice of (interview) lan- guage, conceptual equivalence, translator credentials, researchers' language ability, (back) translation of the interview guide, translation of interview quotations (see Squires, 2009).

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APPENDIX

Cross-Journal Comparison Looking at the findings in Table Al, it can be seen that the reporting of translation decisions differs significantly across journals for quantitative and/or qualitative papers. Regarding quantitative papers, the studies that appear in the most highly ranked journal (JIBS) are more likely to raise cross-language issues. The qualitative papers that mention how they dealt with translation are more likely to be

found in lower ranked journals, but this is primarily the result of the absolute number of qualita- tive papers that appear in these journals. Overall, it seems that quantitative papers pay more atten- tion to language issues than qualitative papers. As shown in Table Al, Type 3 is the most common category of cross-language studies used in quan- titative (120 or 36%) articles. However, the "not clear" Type is the most applied category among qualitative (26 or 39%) papers in the examined period.

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^ Translation in cross-language international business research Agnieszka Chidlow et al 582

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Agnieszka Chidlow holds Polish and British citizen- ship and a PhD from Staffordshire University, UK. She is a Senior Lecturer in International Business

at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her research interests lie in the areas of location choices

of MNEs as well as qualitative and quantitative methodological issues in international business.

Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki is a Greek citizen with a PhD from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research interests lie in the areas of language and international business, qualitative research metho- dology and philosophy of science.

Catherine Welch is an Australian citizen with a PhD

from the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She is an Associate Professor in International Busi-

ness at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests lie in the areas of qualitative research methodology and process approaches to studying firm internationalisation.

Accepted by Suzanne Tietze, Guest Editor, 30 October 2013. This paper has been with the authors for two revisions.

Journal of International Business Studies

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