Feminist researchers engage reflexively with questions of how power operates through intersubjective processes like building rapport, obtaining consent, and being accountable in the ‘field.’ But how do researchers build these connections across embodied and linguistic differences in interlingual research involving local interpretation? In this paper, we delve into our experiences as a foreign researcher and a local interpreter conducting interviews and group discussions with low-income women waste workers in India. We focus on our co-navigations of positionality and power with a focus on language, emotion, and embodiment in connecting with participants and reflect on how interpretation and translation processes can mediate, complicate, and enrich connection-building. We argue that emotional, embodied, and linguistic challenges and opportunities are not uniformly experienced between differently positioned team members and require space to grapple with divergent experiences, understandings, and outcomes that emerge across this nexus. We detail three research encounters, analyzing the nuances of positionality in our divergent roles; our navigations of care and refusal manifesting across the triple subjectivity of encounters; and our strategies for working across languages, embodiment, and emotion in the colonial past-present. The paper contributes to feminist, anti-colonial methodologies by providing insights into our experiences of connection-building in the ‘field’ and revealing the ‘scaffolding’ work and relations which support our processes and pursuits of ethnographic research, translation, and accountability.

女权主义研究人员本能地探讨权力如何通过主体间过程运作的问题，例如建立融洽关系、获得同意以及在“领域”负责。但是，在涉及本地解释的跨语言研究中，研究人员如何在体现和语言差异之间建立这些联系呢？在本文中，我们深入研究了作为外国研究人员和当地翻译对印度低收入女性垃圾工人进行采访和小组讨论的经验。我们专注于位置和权力的共同导航，重点关注与参与者联系的语言、情感和体现，并反思口译和笔译过程如何调解、复杂化和丰富联系建设。我们认为，不同定位的团队成员之间所经历的情感、具体和语言方面的挑战和机遇并不相同，因此需要空间来应对这种关系中出现的不同经历、理解和结果。我们详细介绍了三个研究遭遇，分析了我们不同角色中立场的细微差别；我们在遭遇的三重主观性中表现出关心和拒绝的导航；以及我们在过去和现在的殖民时期跨语言、体现和情感开展工作的策略。本文通过深入了解我们在“领域”建立联系的经验，并揭示支持我们民族志研究、翻译和问责的过程和追求的“脚手架”工作和关系，为女权主义、反殖民方法论做出了贡献。