Linguistic reasons and professional concerns behind Turkish academicians' self-translation of academic texts

Abstract

This study analyzes the linguistic reasons and professional concerns that motivate Turkish academicians to self-translation. To this end, a structured interview was conducted with twelve academicians from three disciplines who reported that they self-translate. The results indicate that the main linguistic reason for academicians to resort to self-translation is feeling incompetent in writing directly in English. The most common professional concern is to contribute to international literature and to get academic appointments and academic incentive payment points by publishing in English. It has been observed that academicians have created a system of publishing in English through self-translation as a solution to these two groups of reasons and concerns: they first write their articles in Turkish, then self-translate with machine translation tools, and have them proofread before publishing. The results offer insights into the self-translation of academic texts through Turkish academicians; however, further comparative research with other non-native English-speaking academicians is needed.