Translating the field

Abstract Ethnographers observe and engage the field. They live with, play with, eat with, dance with, feel with, and, increasingly, write or film with their interlocutors. But most of all, they listen and converse. As they enter the lingual ecology of their hosts through a range of practices of communication, ethnographers begin a multi‐faceted journey of translation—as do their interlocutors. Translation—of words, tone of voice, gestures, facial expressions, musical sounds, images, and a whole array of signifiers—is always an act of interpretation, of translating worlds. Thus, how do we know if, for instance, the Tok Pisin bodi corresponds to the modern English body ? Furthermore, ethnographers and host societies not only translate one word as entity into another and into academic technologies of representation (scholarly writing), they also inevitably translate and transfix concepts, meanings, and classifications. Thus, language is grounded in cultural practices, ontologies, and epistemologies, which, in turn, are politically and life‐historically situated. As ethnographers, we depend on our interlocutors' gift of translating their world and knowledge to us, while we respond on the grounds of our own lingual‐epistemic‐biographical situatedness. Our discussion of translation as a method of inquiry, understanding, and knowledge exchange is based on the view that translation is an inevitable and fundamental relational practice. As such it deals with multiple epistemological realms in which anthropologists find themselves before, during, and after fieldwork. We here unpack the significance of the language/s used in our fieldwork in Germany, central Australia, and the East Sepik region in Papua New Guinea, demonstrating through concrete examples the work of ʻturning overʼ words and worlds.