I’ve chosen this spot because I believe many English teachers, NS and NNS, are asked to ‘edit’ (polish, copy- edit, review, go over) academic papers written in English by local professors. And, the question itself is poorly formed. Maybe what I should be asking is, how much of their papers are local academics writing in English? Is there a way to quantify this? Once the pen and mind of the teacher takes over, what remains of the original work?
I hope there are enough of you about to respond with your experiences and opinions on this topic. Stay warm and Happy New Year. And please send this along to a more appropriate spot if need be.
“Are Local Academics Writing Their Own Papers In English?”
No.
added, Tues 05 Feb 2008, 1155, edit:
My response was a bit too all encompassing. More correctly I should have phrased my response as -
No, not [i]all[/i] local ‘academics’ are writing all of their papers being submitted for publication or presentation in english. Some are doing nothing more than providing an overview of their intended thesis and requesting a cost quote on having the missing parts filled in. In the english language, of course. Sometimes this even includes coaching/training in public speaking with regard to presenting the material to an english speaking peer group audience.
Yes, it’s possible that they are writing their own papers with the help of an English editor. I have helped several academics write their books and papers in English for publication. I helped them with grammar and structure and gave them useful suggestions. The articles and books contained their ideas, their work, their research, and their experience. My editing was just to help communicate their ideas to a larger audience. I think this is a great way for local academics to get their ideas out.
On the other hand, it takes a lot of work and I imagine some lazy academics and impatient editors will skip the work part.
By the way, a small piece of advice. NEVER use a computer translator without a native speaker to review the results… for any language.
It depends where they want to get them published.
If you’re asking a question like that, it suggests to me that you should stick to teaching and leave the editing to professionals – an editor of academic work should not even need to ASK that question!
Douglas is right.
There are various reasons: to get a paper published in a prestigious English-language journal, to submit a paper as a writing sample for application to overseas universities, to reach a worldwide audience of academics, for presentation at international conferences, etc.
Centuries ago, academics, including English-speaking ones, published their papers in Latin. English is the new Latin.
Yes. I know that many of them are. My job is to help polish them up for publication. The ideas are always their own. I just help them fix errors in grammar, punctuation, spelling and word choice, and identify places where the usage is not colloquial and suggest alternatives. Most of them do the writing themselves, in English. Very few go through a translator. The quality of the English varies enormously, from very broken to almost native.
Yes. I know that many of them are. My job is to help polish them up for publication. The ideas are always their own. I just help them fix errors in grammar, punctuation, spelling and word choice, and identify places where the usage is not colloquial and suggest alternatives. Most of them do the writing themselves, in English. Very few go through a translator. The quality of the English varies enormously, from very broken to almost native.[/quote]ditto
Yes they do, but then they generally have to employ the services of a company like mine (Silk Purse Transfiguration Atelier) to actually get them published in decent journals.
I translate a fair number – not a lot, really, but quite a few.
The last one I did this past week was so poorly written in Chinese that I sent it back in English with a strong recommendation that the author get a competent Chinese-native writer to check his original and consider having the paper re-translated when it was better written. It will never be accepted by any serious journal in the state it’s in now.
Another interesting and fun exercise is to Google longish phrases from anything like a methods or background section. The author referred to above had joined a long and illustrious line of his academic forebears in copying – verbatim, including misspellings of English words – an entire section on kernel functions. I have no idea who is the true original author. I’ll bet they’re selling T-shirts at Tian’anmen with this passage on them by now, it’s been through so many papers.
If you’re a Chinese speaking academic and you can’t even write your own Chinese papers – that’s poor. But then again I spent 50% of my time teaching logic and what you could and could not conclude from a set of data when I was supposedly teaching English research writing at a medical school. 
[quote=“sandman”]It depends where they want to get them published.
If you’re asking a question like that, it suggests to me that you should stick to teaching and leave the editing to professionals – an editor of academic work should not even need to ASK that question![/quote]
By the same token an editor of academic work should not need even to ASK that question, or even to even ASK that question. But no matter, according to my researches into the classics, time has been running downhill for some time and will reach bottom before we do.