Always the foreign context is complicated by language. I speak Mandarin. I speak well enough to get by in certain contexts. Our Chinese research collaborators also speak English, so between their English and our Chinese — we have other researchers on the team, some of whom speak no Chinese, some of whom are also fluent — we have no problems communicating with each other.

In the local context what we’ve decided the best way to proceed is for everything to be in both languages. If I’m presenting something, often I’ll have a PowerPoint presentation where I have the English on one side and the Chinese on the other, so that just means prior planning to get the materials to them to translate. But almost always we have interpretation simultaneously, so it takes a lot longer. I say something. Someone translates it. Sometimes we can skip all that, and I can just proceed in Chinese. And when we’re working in the community, most conversations are just ongoing in Chinese.

It’s when we want to make sure that scientific information or things related to the research design are really getting across, we need to make sure that I’ve said it clearly in my language, it’s translated clearly into theirs, and everybody is all on the same page.

But there are always issues. We recently had a meeting in which we were finalizing the survey for the female condom study, and we discovered certain things that just are very difficult to translate. One of them is orgasm, which that is a culturally-defined thing, if there is ever a culturally-defined thing, in many ways.

What is turned on versus orgasm? These were very difficult things to translate, and so we had a lot of discussion about that in English and Chinese with local people and researchers and us trying to figure out, “Well, how can we get across this issue of what you like and don’t like about the female condom in relation to sexual feeling and your partner’s sexual feeling?” and a whole lot of things that are, many of them are very sensitive.

So translation has that aspect as well, that you’re translating not only things that are culturally defined very differently, but things that might also be taboo or sensitive or people talk about it in very different ways from one place to another. So we had long discussions about just exactly how to get that information across to a different audience.