Museum Languages

Abstract

This issue marks a watershed moment in Curator’s commitment to accessibility and inclusion. We have a number of papers that add to our history of publishing innovations in tactile interpretive materials to support blind and low-vision museum users. We’ve published papers on policies and practices that support and encourage universal access in museums and remove barriers for people that need mobility accommodations such as wheelchair users. We have a few papers on neurodiversity in the museum user community, but certainly require substantially more research in our pages to fully embrace the many needs of those users, workers, and volunteers. We have also encouraged our community to address challenges of presenting museum content and accessibility issues to overcome historical discrimination based on culture, race, cast, religion, or belief. But museum professionals do not find our content universally accessible because we have published this journal exclusively in English for the past sixty-four years. Our journal has supported authors who sought to use published content in other languages, but it was not part of our practice to ensure that these translations were accurate, authoritative, nor were they subject to peer-review. With this issue, we’re rewriting our policies regarding translations and making changes in how we publish names to ensure we respect the cultural conventions of our authors. I direct readers to Associate Editor, Professor Dong Yongying, the Director, Department of International Education of Chinese Language, Xidian University, and Adjunct Researcher at Emperor QinShihuang's Terra-cotta Army Museum, who wrote the introduction to our first edition to feature full translations of archival and new papers. In this editorial, I want to thank Prof. Dong for collaborating with our journal over the past three years to manage external peer-review, development, and policy recommendations regarding translations in our journal. In working on translations our reviewers and authors came across several concepts that do not translate easily between languages. They struggled with ideas that do not have linguistic parallels, and occasionally added clarifications to papers. As part of this process, we thought a lot about attribution, and how to work with a typesetting team that does not have the linguistic skills to spot an error as they migrate material online. And we have debugged our online submission portal to ensure that we have a way to manage the process. With this issue, as Prof. Dong makes clear in her Guest Editorial (published simultaneously in English and Modern Chinese), we are now committed to official publication of translations as unique scholarly and peer-reviewed contributions to the literature. Each translation will receive a unique publication date, DOI and issue assignment. The full text will be available to global search engines enabling researchers and practitioners to search for content in their own language. We are also re-launching the CuratorJournal.org website as a bibliographic reference that can use the reader’s preferred language as a filter to identify papers. We also hope that contributors to this journal can use these unique publications to increase the recognition of translation as a scholarly enterprise of equal value to the advancement of the field, and worthy of the credit bestowed on those who lead new research or commit resources to replication testing. With this issue, we are putting out a call for paper translations by our past authors and any museum scholar who is looking to support their community with direct translation. Our editorial offices will share any paper desired by a prospective translator. We accept translations as a unique type of paper submitted through our online portal. We commit to identifying leading scholars who can serve as peer-reviewers with dual language capacity, and to drawing attention to this material through our social media presence as it is published. And lastly, we are changing the convention for how we typeset names to help readers manage cultural values. Henceforth, our papers will only capitalize last names of authors, cease to impose European conventions of name order, and ensure that readers know and properly cite author whose last names contain spaces. Consistent with that new policy, Dr. DONG Yongying’s name will now appear with her family name first as is typical in China. This option was made available to all authors and members of the editorial and production team named in this issue. We also guide readers to ensure that even if they are publishing in English, they defer to local custom when providing the full name of an individual. We hope that this commitment to language can move forward international dialogue, the utility of what we publish, and support the scholars who publish in our pages. John FRASER, Editor (johnf@knology.org) is a psychologist and President & CEO of Knology, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.