Academics in the semi-periphery: Translation and linguistic strategies on the rocky road to publishing in English

Abstract

Publishing in English is now essential for securing tenure and promotion in the social sciences and humanities in Spain, as academic performance is largely evaluated by number of publications in journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) or Scimago Journal Rank (SJR). This relatively new situation has forced academics with varying levels of English to dedicate significant time, effort, and money to obtaining publishable texts. This article investigates academic translation in terms of widespread and invisible translation and editing practices into English, providing a different perspective from previous studies of the transnational circulation of knowledge. Based on semi-structured interviews with scholars from sociology and translation studies, it reflects on their strategies, choices, and preferences for how their texts should be translated or edited, as well as the relationships and routines they develop with their trusted language professionals. All the interviewees expressed a preference for assimilatory strategies or, in other words, the assimilation of their texts into standard or ‘native’ academic English, which should be seen as a means to covet the prestige unfairly reserved for Anglophone scholars. One of the key contributions of this article is to move beyond the popular notion of epistemicide, exploring through empirical detail the linguistic, methodological, and structural issues that these semi-peripheral academics highlight in relation to publishing in the lingua franca for global academia.