Translating academia. Implications for knowledge production in the social sciences and the humanities

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue provides some context on the linguistic landscape that characterizes contemporary academia and on the significance of academic translation for knowledge production. It elaborates on how the adoption of English as academic lingua franca, one of the most pervasive aspects of a global university system shaped by neoliberalism, has led to the coexistence of differently placed languages in a competitive market. Most of the world’s researchers in the social sciences and the humanities today exist in highly multilingual spaces where the simultaneous use of different languages for research, writing and teaching has become routinized. However, the preponderance of English as the universal medium of what counts as globally relevant knowledge also determines the nature of mostly covert, yet widespread academic translation practices without which the functioning of the lingua franca would be impossible. These ordinary yet widely ignored translation practices are constitutive of knowledge production in a global academic space. Reflecting on the politics of translation in this highly unequal field becomes, in this context, a necessary undertaking. Such a reflection entails, on one hand, a recognition of the continuity and inseparability of writing, interpreting, and translating in shaping the production of social scientific and humanistic knowledge and, on the other, a critique of assimilatory forms of translation through which the dominance of plain English as the language of science is constructed.