Lost in translation? Reflections on language and academic writing

Academic writing has a bad reputation, as it is ‘notorious for being turgid, tedious and obscure’. (Italia, 2020) Yet, as Iona Italia (2020) argues,

clear, precise, succinct writing is a public good. If academics could be induced to produce readable prose, their day-to-day professional lives would be greatly improved and the general public would be more inclined to respect our centres of higher learning.

These general remarks apply to social policy scholars, especially those like I who believe that academic research should be accessible to a broader audience, including advocates, policy makers, and people who work for think tanks and international organizations. Even when writing for academic journals like Global Social Policy, scholars should make sure their prose is accessible to university students and people outside of academia who are deeply interested in the topics they write about. This is the case because well-written journal articles, especially when they are available free of charge in open access, are likely to find more readers, both within and outside academia. As the co-editor of two international journals, I can also share the unsurprising fact that clearly written papers are much more likely to be sent out for review and, later on, survive the review process than papers marred with confusing, poorly-edited, and/or structured prose.

Although producing compelling prose in English is typically harder for non-native speakers (I state this as someone whose native language is French and who struggled to write in English for years), even a superficial survey of contemporary academic writing reveals that many academics fail to write clearly in that language even when their native language is English. Yet, this remark does raise a number of issues about academic writing in our increasingly globalized scholarly world, in which language is likely to reflect and reinforce global inequalities. For instance, in contrast to many of their Western European or East Asian colleagues in countries like Japan and South Korea, scholars located in the Global South whose native language is not English might not be able to afford the services of a professional copy editor. This is problematic because hiring such a copy editor would help them improve their prose ahead of submission to an academic journal or a book publisher. More generally, regardless of the availability of copy editors, the growing domination of English in global academic research exacerbates asymmetric power relations between those who are fluent in English and those who are not (for a critical perspective on this issue as it applies to social policy research in Europe, see Barbier, 2013, Chapter 7).

In the past, people from non-English speaking countries might have assumed that their publications in a language other than English (e.g. French, German or Spanish) could become more widely available worldwide through quality translations. Unfortunately, only a relatively small percentage of scholarship written in another language than English is translated into that language, something related to the sheer cost of hiring professional translators. Even when we talk about books written by internationally known authors, it can also take years before they become available in English. Having myself corrected the translation of one of my books from English to French, I can also point to the fact that translating academic publications is a difficult and inexact craft (‘traduttore, traditore’ (‘translator, traitor’) as the Italian adage goes). Recent and future developments in the field of artificial intelligence are likely to both improve the quality and lower the cost of both translation and copy editing, a situation that might reduce global inequalities in academic publishing, including within the field of social policy research. Yet, thus far, because new digital technologies have exacerbated inequalities rather than reduced them (Rotman, 2022), thinking that AI is going to solve this problem on its own is probably simplistic at best.

Regardless, policy scholars in non-anglophone countries must continue to publish in their native language, especially if they want to reach policymakers and, more important, the broader public. This is the case even as universities around the world tend to increasingly value publications in English (e.g. many prestigious Chinese universities now require junior scholars who seek a permanent appointment to publish at least some of their research in English), scholarly journals and academic books in ‘vernacular languages’ remain a significant if declining aspect of scholarly research, including social policy research. Conversely, publications in English can be translated into these ‘vernacular languages’ to make international scholarship more accessible to local university students, among other things.

This discussion leads to broader remarks that transcend writing: translation and social policy language. First, in global social policy research, scholarship on policy translation (i.e. how policies are adapted, reframed and even reshaped as they move from one location to the next) as a source of policy diffusion does draw our attention to the role of language (Campbell, 2004; Clarke et al., 2015). Yet, these remarks about academic writing point to the importance of language in both academic work and policy translation, which is likely to involve scholars translating social policy terms from one language to another. For instance, in French, the translation of the English-language concept of ‘welfare state’ is contentious, and the term État-providence widely used as its French equivalent is problematic (Révauger and Spicker, 1998: 251). Second, this example stresses the importance of language and, therefore, both translation and writing in the development of key social policy concepts, which have a complicated genealogy and transnational life. This is why scholars should study these language and translation processes as they occur in both domestic and international social policy arenas (Béland and Petersen, 2014).

Beyond awareness of these translation challenges, the importance of language in social policy research worldwide is not only instrumental to successful global social policy research but also important to effective academic writing within and beyond that field. This is the case because the awareness of language and translation barriers should motivate scholars to seek even greater clarity in their writing, both in English and in other languages. Clarity is not a naïve stance but an imperative grounded in the fact that effective communication, especially when it transcends national boundaries, requires to strive for maximum reflexive transparency (i.e. being clear because you are aware of potential obstacles to readability) in one’s writing. This reflexive transparency requires to define one’s concepts and assumptions in ways that as many people as possible can grasp without frustrating reading efforts. Reading academic articles and books does require work but, as authors, we need to make our publications as user-friendly as possible, which is a key way for us to reach more people with our scholarship.