Chapter 1. Introduction
from Yugoslavia in 1992. Memories and accounts of this period form mutually
opposed narratives: the siege of Sarajevo by Serbian ‘ethnonationalist’ rebels as the
terrorising of a defenceless civilian population, for example, or as a liberation
struggle against a fundamentalist Islamic government. My having lived in Sarajevo
means that I favour the first rather than the second narrative of the siege; and this
in turn has led me to participate in translation projects which support a model of
Bosnian society based on a narrative of “unity in diversity” rather than age-old
inter-ethnic hatred (e.g. Mahmutćehajić 1998/2000). But research reports are also
narratives, which can be influenced by other narratives which the researcher sub-
scribes to. Thus the background to the Bosnian conflict I sketch in Chapters 2 and
3, and the conclusions I draw about translators’ behaviour, try to follow the pre-
vailing academic narrative of researcher objectivity, but cannot totally exclude my
own anti-ethnonationalist, unity-in-diversity narrative.
Close involvement of researchers in what they research gives depth of insight,
and avoids the risk of “theoretical distortion” (Bourdieu 1977: 1) – that is, of pre-
senting an outsider’s view that systematizes rather than understands. Close in-
volvement, however, also risks subjective bias. But by realizing this, researchers
can adopt safeguards to help prevent it invalidating their research. One key safe-
guard is to submit “the position of the observer to the same critical analysis as that
of the constructed object” (Barnard in Inghilleri 2005: 138): that is, researchers
should analyse their own involvement as part of the research data. This is also why
I refer to myself as researcher and translator subject in the first person, rather than
concealing my involvement behind third-person terms like ‘the present author’.
Another safeguard is to present readers not only with evidence for, but also with
evidence against the researcher’s case (Campbell 1998: 34–44; Abramson 1992).
And where differences between narratives may lead to different interpretations, it
is important to inform readers about other narratives than the researcher’s. A third
safeguard, particularly with researcher-introspection studies, where both the ben-
efits and the risks of close researcher involvement are magnified, is to triangulate
highly qualitative analyses with more objective, quantitative data.
Thus Chapter 2, which now follows, uses a researcher-introspection study
about translating Bosnian poetry to build the book’s theoretical foundation. This
is triangulated in two ways: within Chapter 2, by input from other scholars and
researchers; and in Chapter 3, by a wide-ranging survey involving not only myself,
but also 43 other translators of Bosnian poetry.