Lost in translation? Comparative education research and the production of academic knowledge

Abstract

The worth of academic knowledge tends to be tested against global metrics of citations and articles published in high-ranking English language academic journals. This paper examines academic knowledge production in three local fields of research with different national languages (English, Finnish and French). It focuses on knowledge production on the topic of apprenticeship where there are distinctive differences in the three local research fields and the associated patterns of academic publication over a 15-year period. The findings suggest that publication patterns are still largely tied to the respective national languages. Concerns are raised about the limited visibility of non-Anglophone local contexts and conceptual frameworks as filtered through global academic knowledge production processes. The language practices in the production of academic knowledge need to be challenged to ensure that knowledge from these sources is not lost in translation or in the recontextualisation for global audiences.

Inclusive education in the diversifying environments of Finland, Iceland and the Netherlands: A multilingual systematic review

“…Such an overview is currently absent because national research publications primarily report in the local language, subsequently falling outside the consideration of the international research community. To overcome this linguistic barrier, our review and analysis is based on a multi-step multilingual systematic review approach (Mazenod, 2018) in which studies concerning each specific case country are reviewed in the local language(s). This review is part of a larger effort to understand and reconceptualise inclusive education specifically at macro (e.g.…”

Doing adult education as tertium comparationis: Comparative research in cross-border regions at Germany’s peripheries through the lens of social spatiality

“…To summarise, territorial entities might serve as a starting point for research or a geographically-wise denomination of the units of comparison taken into account; however, as illustrated in this paper, undertaking adult education is constantly and in diverse ways (re)produced by all the parties involved. Nevertheless, this does not revoke the power of the nation’s idea and framework as such (see also Mazenod (2017) on academic knowledge production processes). Acknowledging this ambivalence, the powerful impact as well as the necessity of (national) contextualisation, it represents one of the vital legacies of developing research in and practices of international and comparative (adult) education across its historical trajectories and throughout its procedures of mediating meanings and terminologies (see e.g.…”

The Internationalization of Business Schools Based on Faculty Activities: Explanations From the Social Exchange Theory

“…Another barrier to the internationalization of academics concerns the limitations from their (lack of) command of a foreign language (English in most cases), which particularly affects activities in the fields of human sciences and applied social sciences, in which the ability to articulate an argument is even more essential (Mazenod, 2018). Carneiro et al (2015) and Lazzarini (2012) also argue that the main barriers perceived by academics are: (a) the difference in the procedures that international publications use to evaluate papers; and (b) the failure by some educational institutions to value the time and resources required for internationalization, and the effort required to produce papers.…”