Meaning Across Languages: Demonstrating an Auditable Translation and Interpretation Workflow for Multilingual Qualitative Research in DR Congo

Multilingual qualitative research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo frequently depends on interpretation and translation across French and national or local languages, yet these processes are often reported as technical steps rather than methodological sites where meaning, power, and confidentiality are negotiated. This article presents an auditable Translation and Interpretation Workflow that documents how talk moves from interpreted interviews to translated transcripts and analytic claims. Using examples from Congolese qualitative projects, the article shows how translation choices alter coding, theme boundaries, and causal interpretation, especially when participants use indirect accusation, kinship terms, emotion idioms, legal administrative language, or stigma laden and politically sensitive expressions. Comparative analysis shows that literal, meaning based, culturally annotated, and protective strategies produce different analytic possibilities, with distinct tradeoffs for safety, feasibility, and interpretive precision. The workflow provides feasible documentation standards, including interpreter profiling, concept glossaries, translation memoing, bilingual verification on an audit subset, structured adjudication, and implementation templates for translation memos and adjudication notes. The article concludes by identifying criteria for evaluating successful translation workflows and by clarifying how the model can be adapted to other multilingual qualitative settings.