The contribution of language professionals to academic publication: multiple roles to achieve common goals

Korean Scholars’ Use of For-Pay Editors and Perceptions of Ethicality

“…Twelve percent had their papers translated by for-pay editors. The findings of this study confirm what existing studies reviewed earlier indicated; language professionals' roles are multifaceted and encompass a wide range of tasks [4]. Although help provided to address lower-order concerns such as proofreading and issues related to formatting and styles are typically viewed as appropriate, text alteration incurred by for-pay editors involving higher-order concerns and convent-level errors warrants further examination.…”

“…The mean score for the question concerning whether the expenses incurred by the use of for-pay editors was financially burdensome was 3.5, slanting towards "agree" (See Table 1). 4 For this part of the analysis, data from two health faculties were excluded due to the small size. Data from two faculties who specified no fields and two who specified more than one field were also excluded.…”

“…As noted by Harwood, Austin, and Macaulay [42], and Bennet [21], those who assist with writing often face ethical dilemmas as to what is the appropriate boundary of help. Lack of parameters can cause editors to fail to provide services for fear that they are not within their remit [4]. Alternatively, "some may inadvertently, or indeed ill-advisedly, engage in practices with ethical implications they are unaware of" [8] (p. 3).…”

“…Many consider the use of language professionals as appropriate or even essential, and some journals openly encourage receiving help from language professionals, or native English speakers, for scholars who use English as an additional language (EAL). However, the general advice to have the manuscripts reviewed and edited by native English speakers seems to reveal the assumption that the role of editors centers on a narrowly defined set of areas [4,5]. For the EAL scholars who live in non-English speaking countries, native English-speaking peers who can provide such help are not always easily accessible, and for this reason, scholars resort to the for-pay editors and translators who specialize in scholarly publishing.…”

2. Introducing research rigour in the social sciences: Transcultural strategies for teaching ERPP writing, research design, and resistance to epistemic erasure

“…Indeed, it has been reported that editing work that focuses exclusively on the textual surface is unsatisfying to NNES writers, even though a majority of editing done by native-English-speaking editors was found to be limited to basic aspects in texts (Ventola & Mauranen, 1991). However, studies of conversations around texts have found that authors experience great difficulty in articulating their desired meaning (Willey & Tanimoto, 2012), often because authors and language professionals do not share a common metalanguage (Burgess & Lillis, 2013). Therefore, editors must hone their skills in communicating with authors so as to maximise the efficiency of these meetings and limit the complications that this extra time spent creates for issues of billing, in the case of the freelance editor, and for potentially longer waiting times for other authors of the institution in the case of the in-house editor.…”