Qualitative research is invaluable to facilitate the exploration and understanding of the experiences of individuals about diverse phenomena across different cultures and contexts (Bhattacharya, 2017;Teherani et al., 2015). Qualitative research is also context-dependent and offers an emic viewpoint of the social and cultural reality of the participants (Azungah, 2018). Conducting rigorous qualitative research requires researchers to attend to the cultural and social nuances influencing the studied phenomena. Increasing globalization and diversity create a need for more cross-cultural qualitative research, but language differences between researchers and participants can substantially affect the rigour of this type of research (Nasri et al., 2020). The language of researchers and the participants, and the differences in language arising due to translations and different dialects, can significantly influence qualitative research since they affect conceptualization, data collection, analysis and reporting procedures (Nes et al., 2010).Researchers conducting cross-cultural qualitative studies involving non-English-speaking participants often collect data in their