Friday 5 October 2018

citations - Should references in foreign language be translated to make popular audience get familiar with how academia works?


Typically, references in foreign language are cited with title and journal name in original language, whether they are academic or popular science books. As pointed out in this answer, popular science books, written by native authors and published by different publishers, report English, German and French references without any translation.


Of course leaving the identification of the references is vital. However, I wonder if this is the best practice for the audience who are not familiar with how academic works, especially kids. I imagine that having them written in their mother tongue will make them compelling and informative enough to read, and after reading them, they will know at least these things:



  • Academic researches are published in academic journals, collaborated by many authors

  • Titles tend to be very specified, journals are very niche

  • Consistency needs to be maintained

  • And whether they understand them or not, some terms will get into their mind, enhancing their vocabulary. To put it as Wittgenstein, "my language is the limit of my world".


The book I'm translating is What If? from Randall Munroe. It's academic enough to have several pages of references, but entertaining enough to have comic on it. What I am trying to do is to find the balance point to make an academician and a kid both happy. One reference of it goes like this:




Merlis, Timothy M., and Tapio Schneider, “Atmospheric dynamics of Earth-like tidally locked aquaplanets,” Jounal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems 2 (December 2010); DOI:10.3894/JAMES.2010.2.13.



Questions:




  1. Should this be done? I guess yes, despite of the current practice. How far should this be applied? Having the origin text first, the translation first, or only the translation if other identifications exist such as DOI or URL? As long as the audience can trace the references on their own, then there's no reason for not doing this, right? What if only some references have DOI, and some others have dead links? Should I add the DOI for every academic papers? What to do with blog posts and YouTube clips?




  2. Is there any drawback of this? Would the readers lose their interest in the middle, or having no interest in reading them at all, hence wasting the translating time?







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