English as a Lingua Franca in Academia

The overwhelming dominance of English as a lingua franca in the academic domain is having an insidious effect upon other languages, leading to the curtailment or erosion of their traditional scholarly discourses. Translators are often unwitting agents in this process, whether they are translating into or out of English. In the first case, market forces ensure that texts written by foreign academics need to be thoroughly domesticated to ensure acceptance by international journals, a process that sometimes involves the destruction of the entire epistemological infrastructure of the original. In the second, the prestige of the source language often means that English rhetorical patterns are calqued upon the target language. To date, little attention has been given to these matters in training translators. This paper suggests ways in which these issues may be confronted in translator training programmes. The aim is to alert trainees to the ideological issues involved in academic translation, and equip them with the linguistic, cultural and interpersonal skills to challenge dominant discourses, without losing sight of the real-world constraints under which they will be expected to operate.