The Scientific Revolution and Its Repercussions on the Translation of Technical Discourse
Abstract
The Scientific Revolution of the 17th century not only revolutionized the English world view, it also brought about profound changes on the level of discourse. Through a process of grammatical metaphorization (Halliday and Martin 1993), primary experience was linguistically recons trued to create a picture of a static objective universe from which all subjectivity was effectively removed. The Catholic cultures of Continental Europe were initially resistant to the scientific worldview, remaining loyal for political and religious reasons to the earlier humanistic model (Bennett 2007a, 2007b). Nevertheless, by the late 20th century, with the pressures of globalization, most had developed a scientific discourse of their own, essentially calqued from the English model. The fact that this discourse was borrowed however, rather than resulting from an internal process of evolution, has led to certain grammatical and rhetorical inconsistencies, which raise problems for translation. This paper discusses some of the technical issues besetting the English translator of Portuguese scientific texts, including difficulties related to nominalizations, impersonal verb structures and the intrusion of features from the traditional discourse. It also considers ethical and epistemological questions resulting from the process of linguistic colonization (Phillipson 1992, Pennycook 1994).
... However, it is not so, particularly in fields where knowledge and ways of knowing are rooted and constructed in a given geopolitical and cultural context, and some concepts may not find equivalents in the Anglophone world (Wilmot & Tietze, 2023). Regarding the downside of publishing in English, scholars have expressed their concerns, including decreasing research on topics of local, regional and national relevance; eradicating non-Anglophone academic genres and norms of knowledge construction as equal alternatives to knowledge production; increasing asymmetry in information flow and access; and disadvantaging non-Anglophone authors in language use (Bennett, 2011;Li, 2015;Mur-Dueñas, 2013;Ordorika, 2018). Disseminating research of international relevance, adhering to the Anglophone way of knowledge construction and depriving local communities of access to information, non-Anglophone journals are thus assimilated into an Anglophone journal. ...
Key points
Publish in English or perish is becoming a reality in many non‐Anglophone countries.
Non‐Anglophone journals are facing a dilemma: losing appeal to authors/reviewers if published in local languages or losing linguistic/cultural identity if published in English.
This article analyses language policies those journals may use and positions them on a capital‐identity matrix to highlight their advantages and disadvantages.
The article elaborates on two emerging language policies (bilingual publishing and extended English summary), both helping preserve their identity and take advantage of the capital of the English language.
The article provides insights into the pros and cons of different language policies and how to select policies that best support journal survival and development.
... 101-114). This rhetorical contrast raises a number of problems for the translation of academic texts from Portuguese into English (Bennett, 2011). ...
The recent rise in the number of English-medium journals in non-Anglophone countries stems from the hegemony of English in global scholarly communication, and language requirements outlined by such journals to authors offer a valuable yet often overlooked source of information in terms of underlying values and assumptions concerning knowledge production and circulation. Drawing on the notion of “semiperiphery” to refer to Brazil’s current standing within global scientific publishing, this exploratory study focuses on author guidelines of Brazilian English-medium journals indexed in the SciELO database to map language requirements established for manuscript submission and to assess, from a discursive perspective, whether they reinforce or disprove dominant ideologies regarding academic publishing, knowledge construction and dissemination, and the status of English as the academic lingua franca. The research data included 98 journal guidelines sections from seven subject areas, and results suggest that journals across the disciplinary spectrum endorse the primacy of (native speaker) English in knowledge dissemination, which calls for a critique of scientific monolingualism on the part of research policymakers, in Brazil and elsewhere
... It is, in fact, style and rhetoric that are at the heart of the debate. In her exploration of the development of the dominant Anglo-American model of academic writing, Bennett (2011) underlines the links between the Scientific Revolution of the 17 th century, Enlightenment values and the emergence of logical argumentation, pointing out that the Catholic cultures of Continental Europe long resisted this paradigm "for identity and political reasons" (Bennett 2011, 192), cultivating a less explicit writing style. ...
Introduction to the volume Academic writing from cross-cultural perspectives: Exploring the synergies and interactions.
This chapter discusses why Systemic Functional Linguistics provides a more suitable framework for this study than formal or cognitive or even alternative functional approaches. It also outlines the aspects, derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics which will be used. Process types of finite verbs provide a suitable aspect in the ideational metafunction, and a system of five process types is used. Thematic structure fits into the textual metafunction, and both the grammatical function and a semantic categorization of themes are considered. Modality provides an aspect of the interpersonal metafunction. In addition, the nominalization of processes, which Halliday considers to be of particular importance in scientific writing, is taken into account.
El presente trabajo busca intervenir en una de las discusiones centrales del giro afectivo, la distinción entre afectos y emociones, especialmente en su relación con la cuestión del lenguaje. Para ello, aborda ciertos problemas relativos a la relación compleja pero crucial que hay entre el dolor y las palabras, poniendo el foco en el problema de la depresión. Necesitamos palabras para el dolor, pero las palabras también pueden profundizarlo. No solo se trata de que no faltan las palabras, sino de que hay muchas, en muchos casos compitiendo entre sí: no da lo mismo qué palabras usamos para nombrar el dolor. Con aportes de la tradición filosófica feminista y queer, y del campo interdisciplinario de estudios de traducción, el artículo plantea discusiones filosóficas y políticas sobre la pluralidad de las lenguas a la hora de nombrar, entender y experimentar el malestar, y sus implicancias para la distinción entre afectos y emociones.
Local (peripheral) social sciences and humanities journals are underrepresented in major indexes due to linguistic, ideological, and disciplinary bias. To seek international visibility without sacrificing their local identity, they are adopting translation-mediated bilingual publishing to construct a new identity. Since bilingual publishing is a new trend, what identity is being constructed is rarely investigated. This article aims to explore the linguistic, content, and communicated identity of those journals. Content analysis was used to review the language policies (websites, article abstracts, and full articles), the composition of editorial teams, pools of contributors, instructions to authors, journal overviews, and website logos or journal covers of sixty-eight peripheral social sciences and humanities journals. The results indicate that the majority are attempting to construct a glocal identity, a hybrid identity to maintain their unique status as a local journal and simultaneously strive for better recognition in the international community. Another finding is that the journals are divided in terms of communicated identity, causing obstacles to the successful construction of a new identity. This study provides evidence on the construction of a glocal identity by bilingually published peripheral journals and has implications for the strategic use of linguistic and non-linguistic resources in identity construction.
This paper analyzes the strategies adopted in the English translation of the Arabic novel Captives of Superstition State (2019) from a Cultural perspective. In translating literary works, especially between Arabic and English which belong to two distant cultures, cultural loss seems to be inevitable. Salih’s translation focuses on the transfer of the verbal message of the source text and is mostly concerned with its target reader. In terms of culture, Salih’s translation employs many strategies to provide the same equivalent in the receiving culture to maintain the original cultural identity preserved in the source text.
Chapter 17 highlights how translation studies’ interaction with genre analysis, register studies, critical language study, contrastive rhetoric and the study of languages for special/academic purposes relates to the translation of academic texts. Most investigations contrast English with languages such as French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Slovene, Hungarian, Finnish and Danish, and the foci of analyses relate to a wide range of topics, such as translation strategies, style and register, terminology, and culture-specific discourse conventions. The chapter identifies the challenges that the field faces and the areas where further research is needed.
English academic discourse, which emerged in the 17th century as a vehicle for the new rationalist/scientific paradigm, was initially a vehicle of liberation from the stifling feudal mindset. Spreading from the hard sciences to the social sciences and on to the humanities, it gradually became the prestige discourse of the Anglophone world, due no doubt to its associations with the power structures of modernity (technology, industry and capitalism); today, mastery of it is essential for anyone wishing to play a role on the international stage. The worldview that this discourse encodes is essentially positivist; it privileges the referential function of language at the expense of the interpersonal or textual and crystallizes the dynamic flux of experience into static, observable blocs, rendering the universe passive, inert and devoid of meaning. Despite its obvious limitations for dealing with a decentred, multi-faceted, post-modern reality, its hegemonic status in the world today is such that other knowledges are rendered invisible or are swallowed up in a process of 'epistemicide'. This paper examines this process from the point of view of the translator: one of the primary gatekeepers of western academic culture. Drawing on surveys carried out in 2002 of Portuguese academics working in the humanities, it attempts to discover just what happens to the very different worldview encoded in traditional Portuguese academic discourse during the process of translation, and goes on to discuss the political and social consequences of the ideological imperialism manifest in editorial decisions about what counts as 'knowledge' in today's world.
A much-cited and highly influential text by Alastair Pennycook, one of the world authorities in sociolinguistics, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language explores the globalization of English by examining its colonial origins, its connections to linguistics and applied linguistics, and its relationships to the global spread of teaching practices. Nine chapters cover a wide range of key topics including: international politics colonial history critical pedagogy postcolonial literature. The book provides a critical understanding of the concept of the ‘worldliness of English’, or the idea that English can never be removed from the social, cultural, economic or political contexts in which it is used. Reissued with a substantial preface, this Routledge Linguistics Classic remains a landmark text, which led a much-needed critical and ideologically-informed investigation into the burgeoning topic of World Englishes. Key reading for all those working in the areas of Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and World Englishes.
Translation and Globalization is essential reading for anyone with an interest in translation, or a concern for the future of our world’s languages and cultures. This is a critical exploration of the ways in which radical changes to the world economy have affected contemporary translation.
This volume brings together key writings since the 1992 publication of Linguistic Imperialism - Robert Phillipson's controversial benchmark volume, which triggered a major re-thinking of the English teaching profession by connecting the field to wider political and economic forces. Analyzing how the global dominance of English in all domains of power is maintained, legitimized and persists in the twenty-first century, Linguistic Imperialism Continued reflects and contributes in important ways to understanding these developments.