Aims and objectives

Multilingualism and translation in researcher’s changing work: perspectives from practice and philosophy of science” is a research project funded by the Kone Foundation (2024–2027) and conducted by the ReTra research group of the School of Humanities of the University of Eastern Finland. The project is connected to the BOMOCULT research community. 

In the project, we study the role of multilingual communication in research work and the translatorial nature of the research process, i.e. the activities in which content originally expressed in one language is presented in another. In addition to professional translation and interpreting, we are interested in the many forms of interlanguage communication where the actor is a non-professional or paraprofessional translator, typically the researcher themself – technological tools, such as machine translation or AI. 

When a multilingual world is reported in one language, nowadays often in English, the research process inevitably involves translation. This, however, often goes unnoticed, and the researchers themselves neglect to realize that they actually transfer content from one language to another. This phenomenon is what our project concentrates on. 

Background   

The project has its origins in the first “Translation of research materials” course organized at the University of Eastern Finland in 2018. Our attention was drawn to how extensively translation and interpreting permeates the research process. This sparked our interest and inspired us to investigate the activity in more detail. 

Objectives  

Our goal is to shed light on multilingualism and translation in researchers’ work by combining the perspectives of translation studies and philosophy of science. We collect data from different countries and fields of science.  At the core of our investigation is the researcher, the translation practices they have and the extent to which they are aware of the importance of translation in their research work. We also pay attention to the use of language technology, including AI applications, which are rapidly and increasingly adopted as tools to help research. Additionally, we aim to produce educational material for researchers that helps them identify and solve challenges of multilingual communication in their everyday work. 

Implementation  

The project’s empirical research material consists of survey data, interviews and focus group discussions.  The survey is aimed at researchers at different career stages. It is complemented with in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with researchers and translators working with research topics. The data is analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively.