Abstract
The dominance of English as the world language of publication has had a decisive impact on the dissemination of information and innovation across cultures, with a resulting tendency to a standardization of scientific conceptualization. This dominance does not only impact scientific and academic discourse, but also the whole range of professional and technical texts representative of various specialized discourses. This paper advocates engaging in the practice of dynamic translation to keep non-English specialized languages alive. Advanced students’ analysis of translation projects yields revealing examples of conflicting views of the world, between English and French, in emerging and controversial fields such as “shadow banking” or “human branding”. The students’ evaluation of alternative solutions to problems of equivalence highlights the cultural gaps which exist within global fields of knowledge and can be interpreted in terms of the intercultural and interlinguistic transfer of specialized metaphor. It is shown that the practice and analysis of translation provide an appropriate approach for a better understanding of languages for specific purposes (LSP) and the development of awareness of domain loss and epistemicide.
Highlights
The dominance of English in the publishing world has had a decisive impact on the dissemination of information and innovation across cultures, with the resulting risk of a standardization of scientific conceptualization and domain loss, where an increasing number of fields can no longer be expressed in any language other than English
This paper advocates engaging in the practice of dynamic translation [6] to keep non-English specialized language alive
This paper has shown how a reflective practice of translation can contribute to an exploration of the interaction between lexico-semantic variations, specialized terminology, cultural transfer and domain loss
Summary
The dominance of English in the publishing world has had a decisive impact on the dissemination of information and innovation across cultures, with the resulting risk of a standardization of scientific conceptualization and domain loss, where an increasing number of fields can no longer be expressed in any language other than English. Awareness of this risk has developed lately in the field of academic discourse analysis [1,2,3] and various leads have been offered to counter the exclusion of non-English speakers, who tend to be considered as “peripheral writers” [4,5].
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