International Collaboration Posted on May 2, 2006 Ellen Frank (bio) recommends learning the language and making site visits when conducting international research.

If you’re attracted to the culture where you’re thinking about collaborating, if you feel strongly tied to the collaborators with whom you might be working, it can be an incredibly satisfying enterprise, but, at least in my experience, you have to be committed to being on site. There’s no way, and this is true for all multi-site work. There’s no way of knowing what’s going on at another site unless you visit it.

Of course, with international collaboration outside of the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand, there is a huge challenge of language. Most of my international collaboration has been in Italy. I, prior to beginning the collaboration, learned to speak Italian well enough that I could communicate with my colleagues in Italian, and more important, with the people who surround my colleagues, because most of them do speak English, but I can speak to their secretaries. I can speak to the guy who repairs the refrigerator where we store our blood samples, so I have a capacity for getting things done and for understanding what the problems are in getting things done that might not be available to someone who isn’t fluent in the language.

And there is something about international collaboration that’s like that, because not everything’s working against you, but many things are, and being able to puzzle it out, figuring out how to make it work, can just be enormously satisfying.

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