Fieldwork Lost in Translation

My visit to Kamakyanagar, Odisha, was my first field visit explicitly related to my work at my host organization. I was assisting with a project that sought to understand how communities benefit from institutional monitoring and evaluation tools. The research question was abstract and layered in many aspects. Asking people to reflect on a reflective practice would be a struggle to communicate even in the same language.

Members of the Kamakhyanagar Multi-Actor Platform engaging in conversation with FES team members. Photo credit: Author

This visit involved the daunting task of filtering these questions through three languages—English to Hindi to communicate with the local NGO team members, and from Hindi to Odia for the team members to communicate with the communities whose opinions we sought. We received answers through the same filtration process: Odia to Hindi, and Hindi to English.

There was a surrealness to asking a question, hearing the response, and realizing that the question asked by you was not the same one heard by the respondent. This was a struggle that I, weirdly, had not expected to encounter, either because of hubris or a confidence in the practice of translation. For reference, below are the questions we hoped to gather answers to, informing a use case for learning, monitoring, and evaluating tools across contexts.

Area	Facilitating org	MAP convening org
Purpose, value	Why is it important for the MAP to understand what outcomes have emerged and how they happened? Do you see Outcome Harvesting as primarily a learning tool, an accountability tool, or both? Why?	What have you learned about the MAP’s strengths and weaknesses through these tools? Do these tools help build your credibility with the government or other actors? Do you see this as part of your platform’s rhythm?
Use of insights	How will you use the insights from Outcome Harvesting or Progress Matrix? Who are the primary audiences for insights? (Internal/external?)	After doing OH or the Progress Matrix, what action did you take? Who followed up? Did the insights affect plans or partnerships?
Domains of interest	In which domains do you most want to assess outcomes? Has outcome harvesting been productive to that end?	What kind of changes/progress matter most to your MAP (CFRs, public funds, inclusion)?
When to use	What triggers the use of each tool — new phase, MAP milestone, external push? Are there moments when one tool is more useful than the other?	When do you think is a good time to do these reflections? Are there local events or needs that make it feel timely?
Feedback loops	How do you ensure findings feed back into program design, training	Are findings discussed again in MAP meetings or shared with the community? Would it help to use these tools every year? How would you ensure that happens?
Ownership & accountability	Who follows up on the insights — internally or with MAPs?	Who ensures that insights lead to follow-up or planning?
Participation & representation	Are certain voices underrepresented in reflection processes?	Were all MAP members able to contribute honestly during the sessions? What would help improve inclusion and reflection across the MAP, or from outside the MAP?

Questions translated into Odia for a participatory research exercise. Photo credit: Author

Though the questions are relatively clear, the specifics and nuances of each language slightly alter the meaning of sentences, which may sound intuitive in English but come off as clunky and confusing when directly translated. In my past work, where I had to translate from English to Hindi and vice versa, I almost always encountered a sentence that would make much more sense if it were reworked conceptually in the other language, as opposed to simply translated.

The function of translation in the fieldwork setting is not linguistic accuracy but the transmission of ideas. The team member I traveled with, who is Indian and spoke Hindi well, remarked to me on the side how even the first translation of our questions into Hindi seemed to alter the nature of the question. When we received our answers in Odia, they were translated to Hindi again, and I had to do the work of translating them back to English for our notes. I felt as if the limits of my language ability were being reached. I had to do the work of not literally translating but perceiving how the altered nature of the question, when it was translated, would have also altered the response, translating with that change in mind.

To supplement this head-spinning exercise, I had to read between the lines and gather opinions from the subtleties of how respondents spoke—their body language, tone, and inflection. Even the way they perceived our questions could tell us a lot about their thought process in thinking about these tools.

There was also a layer of trust we needed to have with the team members we were with, to translate not literally, but to get to the gist of the ideas being expressed. This became especially important during moments when, for 10–15 minutes straight, community members would be having a lively debate in Odia. It is impossible to offer a direct translation for every comment made; it becomes up to the translator to condense that conversation into its core ideas. Despite the barrier, the way the debate played out was full of human signals that we all could perceive, and that, combined with a summary from our team, provided rich data nonetheless.

This field visit was a reminder that translation is not a mechanical process, but a very human unfolding.

Author

Abhiyudh Rajput

Abhiyudh is an aspiring urban development and public health professional, passionate about understanding the intricate relationships between people, spaces, and cultures. During their undergraduate education in Anthropology and Public Health at the University of Rochester they have explored a breadth of academic interests; the politics of borders in South Asia, global health advocacy with a community health organization in Odisha, as well as urban design in Barcelona, Spain. This past year they conducted Fulbright-funded research to understand how social infrastructure produces pedestrian safety in streets in Delhi, India. This work developed their interest in understanding the ways communities care for and maintain their spaces, leading Abhiyudh to work with the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) this upcoming year. They will work on the Promise of Commons initiative to ensure gender-inclusive, community-led governance of rural Commons in India. They see this as an opportunity to deepen their understanding of sustainable development, community engagement, and the systems that impact the environment and thus livelihoods. They see this work as a crucial step in their journey as an urban development professional. Outside of work, Abhiyudh is an avid photographer and musician, doing creative photo shoots with friends, capturing street and landscapes as well DJing for friends' parties, queer events, and artistic spaces like fashion shows. A lover of languages, they are excited to further develop their Hindi and Urdu, as well as learn Gujarati during the Fellowship.

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