Scholarship is being damaged all over the world, write Mary Jane Curry and Theresa Lillis.
Is your first language English? If so, imagine that you are now required to write about your research using only Spanish or Japanese. Many scholars around the world are facing a parallel situation, with pressures to publish their work in English increasing markedly in the past two decades. Indeed, many people now assume that English is the global language of scholarly publishing.
This claim is usually supported by evidence from the limited universe of around 27,000 journals included in the Web of Science (WoS) indexes -- most prominently, the Science Citation Index -- most of which publish in English. However, more than 9,000 peer-reviewed scholarly journals are being published in other languages, with French (3,500), German (2,700), Spanish (2,300) and Chinese (1400) contributing the highest numbers. Most of these journals are excluded from prestigious journal indexes, thus perpetuating the ideology that English is the global academic lingua franca.
The pressure to publish in journals listed in prestigious indexes has become a global trend, most recently reaching Latin America and Africa. Some multilingual scholars do view using English as a way to reach a broader academic audience than their local context, language or research community affords. But after closely examining the effects of this trend on academics for nearly two decades, we’ve seen little attention being paid to what is lost in this focus on English. The consequences of this major shift in the creation and distribution of academic knowledge, as well as the burdens it creates -- even for scholars who welcome it -- need to be more carefully weighed.
The trend for English-medium publishing emerges from neoliberal policies that affect the goals, activities and working conditions in higher education. Publications in English signal the “internationalization” of institutions of higher education, as publication metrics are key criteria for the global rankings of universities. However, achieving these valued English-medium publications adds burdens to the work of many multilingual scholars. And no, they can’t just get their work translated -- even if scholars have funds for translation (which is expensive), it’s virtually impossible for most scholars to find translators who have a high level of academic English and know both the disciplinary content and the rhetorical conventions of academic journal articles. More...