Translation and Language Treatment in Anthropological Books

Anthropologists conduct their research in different fields by traveling to somehow unknown geographical places. In different stages of the research including gathering the data and then writing the text, translation is an inevitable part. On the whole, anthropologists translate the unknown culture and oral experience in the field into a written text. The purpose of the study was to shed light on how anthropologists treated the language and whether they elaborated on the translation issues. To this end, 30 full-length English anthropological books were selected and the data was gathered based on the matrix method (Garrard, 2011) and De Casanova and Brown’s (2017) coding scheme. The results revealed that the issue of translation and language was addressed only by the limited number of researchers and not enough attention was paid to the actual linguistic translation that is happening in the text. However, those who addressed the issue and elaborated on the strategies that they adopted to overcome the translation difficulties and cultural barriers provide valuable information.