We report on affordances and challenges arising during the preparation and administration of a joint research instrument in a multinational project involving data collection in six European education systems. Linguistic and cultural-systemic translation adds new levels of challenge to the operationalisation of a complex construct like ‘diversity’.
The first phase of the ADiBE project involved gathering information on how CLIL classrooms in six different European countries (Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom) are set up to address the diversity of the students in them, the ultimate aim of the project being to enable transfer of good practice across education systems. In this contribution we reflect on the affordances and challenges which arose in the preparation of joint research instruments for different national education systems.
The staple challenges of operationalising as complex a construct as "diversity", which might be perceived predominantly to be a matter of choices on an abstract, theoretical level as long as one is operating within one language and one education system, take on a protean nature once we enter the world of translation.
There is, of course, English as a lingua franca for project-internal communication, explanation and debate. Matters start to get really interesting, though, once the ideas embedded in a concrete research instrument (e.g. a questionnaire) need to be transformed for use with speakers of other languages and different stakeholder groups. Worse still, these are not only speakers of other languages but they are also embedded in different national educational cultures and current discourses of the moment. In the interest of clarity in a short presentation, we will mainly focus on matters arising in the work of two national project teams who share the same language (Austria, Germany), but also touch upon general challenges during the translation process.
