Bilingual publication of academic journals: motivations and practicalities

Abstract: Many academics choose to publish in an English-language journal to encourage widespread dissemination of their work. Such journals will also tend to have greater recognition, and so may be more useful for career advancement, even in non-English speaking countries. But too strong a focus on English-only journals can have deleterious consequences for the local-language discourse community and the benefits of the local research may not reach the local population. Bilingual publication can, in principle, overcome many of the disadvantages of publishing in English or the local language only, although hard evidence of benefit is not available. This chapter will examine the motivations for bilingual publishing and discuss some of the practical issues involved. We conclude that bilingual publication is labour intensive and costly but can further worthy goals for research communities. It can also be an interesting and rewarding project for translators and one from which they can learn a great deal.