Language barriers --- financial barriers

[Paul Kiparsky]

If you want your work to be accessible to linguistically disjoint  
audiences, why write it up in just one language?   In smaller  
European countries it is, or at any rate used to be, usual to publish  
one's work both in English (or German) in an international journal,  
and locally in the national language.  For English-speaking  
Indologists, the comparable practice would be to publish both an  
English version in an international journal or book, and a Hindi,  
Tamil, or Sanskrit version in India.  As Jan Houben reported here on  
March 3, summaries of the talks at the recent Third International  
Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium were made available both  
in English and in Sanskrit.  The traditional philologists and pandits  
who attended the conference welcomed the Sanskrit version as a step  
to overcoming the language barrier and establishing mutual  
understanding with English-speaking Indologists and computational  
linguists.

Paul Kiparsky


On Mar 18, 2009, at 5:09 PM, Simon Brodbeck wrote:

> On Friday 6 March 2009, Jean-Luc Chevillard wrote: "The more  
> languages one knows, the better."
>
> Few would disagree. But that is from the perspective of the  
> consumer or recipient of texts. Active researchers are also  
> producers of texts, and must produce them in one language or  
> another. From this perspective, one's work will be inaccessible to  
> those who lack facility with the language in which it is presented;  
> and the choice of language is therefore a choice of audience.
>
> On the issue of financial barriers, it is an ongoing source of  
> embarrassment and bemusement to myself and many of my  
> contemporaries that the journals and publishers we have been led to  
> believe are most highly esteemed by our institutional elders (in  
> whose hands our careers lie) tend to be those which most of our  
> desired audience cannot access. One cannot but suppose that, as a  
> result, most of the discourse that there is on indological subjects  
> occurs in contexts systematically ignorant of certain recent  
> discoveries in indology.
>
> The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council has been funding a  
> higher and higher fraction of British indological research in  
> recent years. My perception is that the AHRC are increasingly  
> concerned to ensure that the projects they fund have outputs  
> accessible beyond the university sector. Perhaps, then, pretty  
> soon, projects whose principal written outputs are not to be made  
> freely available online will simply not be publicly funded.
>
> Simon Brodbeck
> Cardiff University