What does language mean to people?
Language is how we argue, how we flirt, how we comfort someone, how we tell stories about who we are and where we came from. It’s not just a tool for communication but how we connect, make sense of our world, and create meaning.
Yet we often don’t think about it deeply. Especially for those of us who only speak one language, we might think about it when we hear slang. The words kids use that make us feel ancient and disconnected or the phrases that were popular when we were teenagers that now sound hopelessly dated. Language changes over time and signals who belongs to which generation, community, or moment in culture, but it’s often not top of mind.
But for the majority of the world’s population who speak two or three languages, language often means something deeper. Different languages carry different emotions, relationships, and versions of ourselves. And given that, people often code-switch depending on who they are speaking with or what they’re talking about. A word in one language might capture an entire feeling or experience that would take several sentences to explain in another. Certain stories are easier to tell in one language. Certain jokes only work in another. We’re often not aware of this—it just happens naturally.
I understood this growing up, listening to my grandparents code switch between English and Yiddish and trying to understand how one word could mean so much, but my doctoral fieldwork in linguistic anthropology expanded my understanding and continues to influence the work we do today at Multilingual Connections.
A language that travels through time
As a graduate student at UCLA, I spent a year in Israel conducting ethnographic research among speakers of Judeo-Spanish, a dying language also known as Ladino spoken by descendants of Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492.
During my fieldwork, through interviews, conversations, storytelling sessions, and community events, I looked at what people did with and through language: how they used it to express identity, create shared experiences, and make sense of their past and present.
One evening, a man named Vitali, perhaps the world’s only Judeo-Spanish standup comedian, joked that Ladino was not just a language, but a travel agency. The audience laughed, knowing exactly what he meant. Speaking Ladino didn’t just communicate information. It activated their identity as Sephardic Jews and transported people across time and space to childhood memories, family stories, and a shared cultural past.
That concept—language as a travel agency—stayed with me and continues to shape how I think about language in research.
Translation and global research
I founded Multilingual Connections over 20 years ago to help organizations work effectively with multilingual content in more than 75 languages. We work across industries, but one of our primary areas of focus is multilingual research.
Research agencies and brands come to us because they want to understand their global customers or communities. They’re conducting surveys, in-depth interviews, and focus groups across languages and cultures. They want to build trust with participants and uncover meaningful insights that inform business and policy decisions. And they’re often working under tight timelines and budgets, which means language sometimes gets treated like a final step on the project checklist:
- Design survey or discussion guide
- Finalize English version
- Send for translation
From a project management perspective, this approach seems to make sense. From a research perspective, it can create problems. Because language doesn’t just deliver questions—in both quantitative and qualitative research, it shapes how participants understand those questions, how natural they sound, how they respond, and what insights emerge. And that matters whether you’re conducting a global survey, moderating a focus group, or interviewing participants one-on-one.
Language shapes surveys
Where this shows up most clearly is in survey translation. A question may look perfectly translated on paper but still produce misleading data if the underlying concept does not carry the same meaning across cultures.
Concepts that appear universal often aren’t. Words like privacy, trust, independence, or even household can carry very different meanings depending on cultural context. Literal translations may be grammatically correct but conceptually confusing.
Response scales can also behave differently across languages. Some respondents tend to avoid extreme answers, while others gravitate toward them. Without careful linguistic and cultural review, these patterns can introduce bias into multilingual survey data. The result is research that appears comparable across markets but may actually be measuring different things.
That’s why high-quality survey translation and multilingual research design go beyond direct translation. They involve reviewing the intent behind questions, adapting language for cultural relevance, and ensuring that respondents across languages interpret questions in comparable ways.
Where AI translation fits
AI translation tools have improved dramatically and can be incredibly helpful for speed and scale. But multilingual research still requires something AI cannot reliably provide: cultural judgment.
AI can translate words. It cannot reliably determine whether a phrase sounds natural to native speakers, whether a survey question carries unintended assumptions, or whether a concept requires cultural adaptation rather than direct translation. It can be inconsistent and introduce bias. It doesn’t know how to handle gender neutrality. In research, those distinctions matter. AI can be a powerful tool, but meaningful multilingual research requires going beyond “good enough” and incorporating human judgement and expertise.
Language shapes interviews and focus groups
In qualitative research, language influences something even more fundamental than question interpretation: what people are able to or choose to share.
When participants are interviewed in a second language, they often simplify their responses. They may avoid nuance, skip cultural references, or choose safer, shorter answers simply because it takes more effort to express complex thoughts. Sometimes they avoid telling certain stories altogether.
But when participants speak in their own language, something different happens. They joke. They reference shared cultural experiences. They use metaphors and expressions that capture emotions and ideas that might be difficult to translate directly. Stories unfold more naturally, and participants often reveal details that would never surface in a second-language conversation.
This is especially important in in-depth interviews and focus groups, where the goal is not just to collect responses but to understand people’s experiences, motivations, and perspectives.
Language also shapes group dynamics. In multilingual focus groups, participants may code-switch depending on who they are speaking with, how comfortable they feel, or which language best captures what they want to say. Skilled bilingual moderators can navigate these dynamics and recognize meaning that might otherwise be missed.
When qualitative research is conducted in participants’ native languages—and interpreted with cultural context in mind—it often leads to richer stories, clearer insights, and a deeper understanding of lived experience.
Designing research with language in mind
Researchers can improve the quality of multilingual research by integrating language into the research design process from the beginning.
That means working with your language solutions partner to:
- plan translation timelines and budgets early
- work with linguistic and cultural experts
- adap research instruments rather than translating them literally
- test materials with native speakers before fielding studies
These practices apply across research methods, whether you are conducting global surveys, in-depth interviews, or multilingual focus groups.
Back to the travel agency
That Ladino travel agency joke from my fieldwork continues to resonate. Language doesn’t just carry information. It carries memories, identities, humor, relationships, and ways of seeing the world. It shapes how people tell stories about their lives and how they interpret the questions we ask them.
Nelson Mandela is credited with saying that if you speak to someone in a language they understand, it goes to their head, but if you speak to them in their language, it goes to their heart. In research, the same principle applies.
When language is treated as a checkbox at the end of a research project, we risk missing those stories and the change to connect with people’s hearts. But when researchers plan for language from the beginning—when surveys, interviews, and focus groups are designed with linguistic and cultural context in mind—we open the door to deeper, more meaningful insights.
Global research brings incredible opportunities as well as real linguistic complexity. If your team is designing surveys, interviews, or focus groups across languages, working with linguistic and cultural experts early in the process can help ensure your research questions resonate the way you intend.
At Multilingual Connections, we partner with research teams to support multilingual studies through translation, transcription, bilingual moderation, and linguistic consulting.
If you’d like to talk through an upcoming project, we’d love to connect.
