Craving the First Global Lingua Franca
Posted on July 17, 2011 by Courtney Lareau
As the end of my trip nears, I fear there is less and less for me to blog about. I have officially finished with the “primary” portion of my research involving one-on-one interviews with cocoa farmers, so from here on out it there will be a lot of surfing the internet for secondary research, sending emails, and making phone calls. Not the type of things that one wants to blog about or that you want to read about, I am sure.
Tomorrow night a group of the Mars Symbioscience management team from both the US and Indonesia will begin their brief stay up-country, so it will be nice to have some familiar faces around. Especially familiar faces that speak English!
I am going on Day 36 here in Indonesia, and aside from my first week in-country visiting touristy Bali and the up-country farmlands with some of the Mars management team, there hasn’t been a lot of opportunity for me to use my English. Other than a greeting smile, a shake of the hands, a brief “Apa Kabar” [How are you?] and “Terima kasih Pak” [Thank you sir], I don’t talk much with the farmers. Certainly, it’s not from a lack of wanting to communicate with them directly but a by-product of the fact that I don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia and they don’t speak English. So I rely heavily on Boe for our communication with farmers, field facilitators, government officials, and every day interactions such as grocery shopping.
And even with an excellent, bilingual colleague by my side, communication is still frustrating. Our research requires us to ask certain questions and get certain answers, and its no where near as simple as having a list of questions in front of us and translating them to the farmer. Not only can there be a cultural barrier in the way I have structured the wording of my questions, but neither Boe nor myself are farmers, nor have we had experience in cocoa before this summer. So it’s not as cut and dry as simply asking the question and documenting the response. Sometimes you have to ask the question two or three times because the person you are interviewing goes off on a tangent when responding. Other times you must re-word the question because its meaning gets lost in translation and the farmer seems to be answering a different question entirely. Or my favorite is when you ask a question, you think the farmer has understood the question and answered it to the best of their ability, only to learn 30 minutes later (as they answer a different question entirely) that now the story seems completely different and you have to go back in clarify what you thought to be true.
At the end of the day, I just want to sit down, chat, and laugh off the frustrations of the day in my own language. And sure, Boe speaks English and we do laugh a lot about the eccentricities of our day, but communicating with a non-native speaker can be a mission in and of it self. When chatting with Boe, I have to ensure I annunciate, avoid slang and euphemisms, and speak at a slow pace in order to give Boe time to process what I am saying. This is a very difficult task for a girl who typically banters at lightening pace with slang words such as prit (pretty), comf (comfy), strugs (struggling), and drive (jerk) [I’d like to thank my fabulous roommates for helping my vernacular to regress to that of a 14-year-old, valley girl].
Then in response, Boe sometimes struggles with understanding the point I am trying to make and even communicating his own message. Don’t get me wrong, his English is great and he has been a rock star at conducting research, but after awhile I begin to realize how much easier it is to converse with a native English speaker.
