English as the "lingua franca" of academia? Inside Higher Ed

This article just popped up in my feed, and I thought I'd share it, as it gets at one of the problems we have at the Global Social Thought Project. 


http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university_of_venus/do_you_speak


This temporary site is set up to be published in English, though we do have a Google Translate API included so that you can read a (probably pretty close) translation of the postings in your own language. And one of the end products of the Project - the compilation of an anthology of social theory works from around the world - will end up being published in English, though our plan is to provide online access to the original language versions of the pieces we publish. But in essence, we run through English. We'll accept submissions to the anthology in French and Spanish as well (because these are the languages the four coordinators know in total), but for the most part, this is an English-language project. 


That presents with a bit of a problem, for precisely the reasons laid out in this article. There are people whose works we want to understand and who we want to know and work with who simply don't speak English (or French or Spanish or...), or don't do so well enough that their work would be "of publishable quality." Do we leave these pieces aside? Do we require the contributor to have them translated into English/French/Spanish at their expense, which might be nigh impossible? Or do we have them translated, and if so, what about all those traces of meaning that get lost when putting things into English? 


Better still is putting it like this: Does requiring submission in the three major colonial languages reinforce the epistemic hegemony we're working to overturn? This is a constant question for us at GSTP, and I don't know how well we'll be able to answer it.