The academic translation is a type of translation that demands the utmost accuracy. It is one of the many disciplines that are behind the international exchange of knowledge. The academic translation is more popular in cities as cities have a higher number of universities and schools. Many people including university students, lecturers, and research assistants require academic translation.
Academic
translation helps researchers to publish their work in international journals.
However, can we eliminate the need for translation by adopting English as the lingua
franca? Could AI replace academic translators? In this post, we will be finding
answers to such questions.
Can
English be a lingua franca?
Just like Latin
used to be, English is already the lingua franca of academia. For instance,
researchers in most Western European countries are more likely to publish in
English than in their native languages. However, this cannot be good news. The
dominance of English can prevent local scholars from getting the attention that
they deserve.
Moreover,
non-English speaking scholars have to domesticate their production in order to
meet the pre-existing trends and customs in English academic traditions. This
ruins the whole epistemological infrastructure of the original one. Simply put,
when non-English speaking scholars are forced to write in English, the
knowledge gets vanished in the process.
Can
machine translation be used for academia?
With the
technical developments, machine translation has started grabbing the attention
of many. People have started wondering if machine translation can be used for
several kinds of translations including academia. Let us tell you that removing
the human element from translation is still very unlikely.
You cannot
achieve the degree of accuracy required with machine translation. Machine
translation fails to create cohesive paragraphs as well as documents. For
instance, machines and software can translate a single word in three or four
different ways throughout the text. This inconsistency can be dangerous for
academic papers.
Academic
translations can be produced by machines however they will require revision and
editing from highly trained human translators. Most of the machines used in
professional settings produce pre-translations which are the suggestions for
translators. They are meant to make everything easier for the translators
however it is far from replacing them.
What makes a great
academic translator?
Academic translation comes with
challenges that only highly-trained, professional translators can handle. So it
is best to give the papers in hands of translators who have experience in the
field. Apart from the knowledge of the language, they have to be accustomed to
the terminology of the given field. An academic translator should have
knowledge of the area to conclude the ambiguities and come up with the most
accurate translation.
To conclude
Adopting English
as a Lingua Franca can cause homogenization of academic translation output. On
the other hand, a translation that fails to acknowledge certain nuances can
result in useless as well as dangerous texts. That’s why it is vital to rely on
quality academic translation services. It will help the globalization of some
of the most important research.
