A more expansive perspective on translation in IB research: Insights from the Russian Handbook of Knowledge Management

Abstract

The treatment of translation in the international business (IB) literature has been predominantly concerned with research methodology and backtranslation. Arguing for a less microscopic concept of translation in IB research, we advocate a more expansive perspective, whereby translation is understood as cross-border interplay of entire terrains of corporate contexts and experience linking multiple mental and social frames of reference. We apply three notions from linguistics and translation studies -equivalence, ambiguity and cultural interference -to problematize the translation of management terms and concepts across languages and to highlight the importance of historical and cultural embedding in the translation process. We substantiate the core argument through analysis of fragments from Russia's first Handbook of Knowledge Management, a text composed of 23 contributions translated from English into Russian, a language in restless regeneration, struggling arduously with Western management terms and concepts after 70 years of communism. This knowledge management text constitutes the essence of an entire corpus of modern management thought and action which is largely unfamiliar to the Russian business and scholarly community. We demonstrate how acts of translation serve as an analog for the cross-cultural transfer of knowledge and how these insights can advance IB translation research into new and rewarding directions.

Language in International Business: A Review and Agenda for Future Research

“…As this implied meaning was found to create frequent misunderstandings in global business communication (Chen et al 2006), an increasing number of scholars recognized the ''transformative power of translation'' (Brannen et al 2014, p. 501). Analyzing the difficulty of translating Western management terms such as ''knowledge sharing'' into Russian, Holden and Michailova (2014) caution against simplistic attempts to replace terms from one tongue with those of another. Following their call, international business researchers have begun to understand translation as a process of interaction across cultures (Brannen and Mughan 2016;Chidlow et al 2014), where meaning may be found in the space between cultures.…”

Assessing the measurement invariance of the four-dimensional cultural intelligence scale across countries: A composite model approach

“…For instance, respondents from France and China have different tendencies regarding agreeing with questions, regardless of their content (Sarstedt & Mooi, 2014). While limited research has explored why translated measures sometimes function differently across cultural contexts, researchers recently began to strongly emphasize that a translation-back-translation procedure is not sufficient to ensure measurement invariance (e.g., Chidlow, Plakoyiannaki, & Welch, 2014;Holden & Michailova, 2014;Tsui et al, 2007). Our findings echo these concerns and highlight the importance of a systematic evaluation of the psychometric properties underlying a measurement instrument before translating it into another language.…”

Rethinking Qualitative Scholarship in Emerging Markets: Researching, Theorizing, and Reporting

“…Even though some of the respondents are fluent in English, the use of their own language has been strongly suggested to facilitate insightful and rich conversations (Marschan-Piekkari & Reis, 2004). When using a foreign language, it is highly possible to lose nuances which matter deeply in qualitative research (Holden & Michailova, 2014). EM qualitative scholars therefore should be wary of interviewing non-English native respondents solely in English (Couper, 2019).…”