Language

Many of the instruments developed for researching the market are in English. The dominance of the Anglo-Saxon world in business and marketing makes problems of translation notorious.

The medium of language acts as a "grid" for defining and letting certain forms of information through to the observer. The error that is caused by this "filter," however, can be reduced. In the process of measuring meaning in international market research it is important that both questions and responses need to reflect the respondents' daily world and be couched in the everyday language that they are familiar with. The evoked answers should not be altered by the particular relevance structures under investigation. Therefore, in the construction of a questionnaire you need to take it as fundamental to use commonsense terms as used in everyday life. These might be quite different in different cultures. Obviously in the case of international research, with questions being presented in a variety of cultural settings, the use of this type of everyday language is even more important.

Standard questions administered in different cultural settings might run the risk of being interpreted differently by virtue of linguistic difference (Evin and Bower, 1952). The use of language, however, is not only important in the process of translation. It starts to be important in the design of the original instruments. Is the language carrying the meaning it purports to carry? Is it stated in such a way that it does not allow for various interpretations in different cultures? Does it express situations which might provoke defensive responsiveness?

There are a variety of ways in which major problems of misinterpretation can be avoided. In particular, in high-context cultures the use of short questions or reactions to a word or concept can be very unreliable. The use of stories is a good way of communicating with the respondents, because people tend to think in stories. Bateson (1980) states the case for the primacy of representatives:

There's a story which I have used before and shall use again: a man wanted to know about mind, not in nature, but in his private large computer. He asked it "Do you compute that you will ever think like a human being?" The machine then set to work to analyze its own computational habits. Finally, the machine printed its answer on a piece of paper, as such machines do. The man ran to get the answer and found, neatly typed, the words: THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY. A story is a little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance. Surely the computer was right. This is indeed how people think.

In the formulation of stories abstract words need to be consistently moved to concrete areas. In doing so the difficulty of achieving equivalent meanings diminishes. In addition, in the design of alternative life situations, it is advised to use those situations that are similarly basic and significant to the potential samples you want to investigate. In doing so the likelihood that a forthcoming translation of it from one language to another will result in a serious alternation of the intended meaning is lessened (Hofstede, 1980). You also need to find samples where the subjects under investigation perform similar activities - thereby sharing common problem areas - which decreases the complexity of the process of achieving this format.

When stories are gathered through questionnaires or through interviews many techniques are available to analyze the meaning of things said. There is software available (words in context) that can sort the essential meanings of what people were trying to say. This software looks at the combination of words and counts the number of words that arise. Obviously lots of extra effort still needs to be put into getting the meaning you want to examine. A multicultural set of analysers can do wonders, in particular by discussing the differences in findings.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 769