An anthropological point of view: exploring the Chinese and Japanese issues of translation about teaching resources

要旨

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The aim of this study is to advance understading of teachers’ and researchers’ work, in particular its cultural specificities, from a resource perspective by exploring the issues and challenges faced during the translation of a theoretical framework, the <jats:italic>Documentational Approach to Didactics</jats:italic> (DAD), from Western (English and French) to East Asian languages (Chinese and Japanese). A basic assumption is that the challenges encountered while translating are driven by the cultural and linguistic differences that exist between the West and East. Adopting the perspective of the <jats:italic>Anthropological Theory of the Didactic</jats:italic> (ATD), we frame the translation work as a transposition process of research praxeology (a model of the researchers’ practices and knowledge) from a Western to an Eastern institution. We investigate this process to identify cultural elements at different levels (school, society, civilization, etc.) using the ATD framework. After translating a DAD article into Chinese and Japanese separately, we then worked collaboratively to identify similar or diverse translation issues and investigated their origins. Consequently, the results revealed a considerable difference between the West and East, and ample similarities between China and Japan, especially in terms of the researchers’ work and its relationship with the teachers’ work.</jats:p>