Translating knowledge in the multilingual paradigm: Beyond epistemicide

The term ‘epistemicide’ was first coined by the Portuguese sociologist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos to refer to the systematic eradication by western science of the indigenous knowledges of the Global South. It was later applied to translation by Bennett in order to describe the way that academic texts produced in non-Anglophone cultures often have to be so radically rewritten for publication in international journals that their epistemological infrastructure is effectively destroyed. The long-term consequences of this process included, it was argued, a drift toward an epistemological monoculture, as scholarly discourses in other languages assimilated to the dominant one through a process of calquing. This argument was developed at a time when the hegemony of English appeared unassailable in the world of academic publishing and beyond. Since then, however, the multi- or translingual paradigm has profoundly challenged this assumption. This article focuses on how knowledge is generated and disseminated within this new paradigm and its implications for Translation Studies. Considering the prevalence, in this domain, of second-language writing, self-translation and paratranslational activities (like language revision and editing), and the demands of a readership with multilingual competence, it suggests that a much broader concept of translation might now be in order.


Mots-clés
discours académique anglais, English as a Lingua Franca (anglais en tant que lingua franca), épistémicide, paradigme multilingue, traduction The term 'epistemicide' was first coined by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1996Santos ( , 2001Santos ( , 2016Santos ( , 2018) ) to refer to the way Western science asserts itself as the only valid form of knowledge at the expense of other ways of understanding the world.In his many publications, Santos is concerned primarily with the indigenous knowledges of the Global South (traditional medicines, community justice systems, local lore about the natural world, etc.) which cannot be understood within the categories set up by modern scientific discourse and are thus being effectively wiped out in the name of progress.
In the first decades of the new millennium, the term was redeployed by me (Bennett, 2007(Bennett, , 2013(Bennett, , 2015) ) to describe what happened when an academic text produced in a non-Anglophone culture was translated into English for publication in an international journal.The norms for what constituted acceptable academic writing were at that time so inflexible and imposed so relentlessly by the cultural gatekeepers (journal editors, peer reviewers, university mentors) that in many cases, the epistemological infrastructure of the text was effectively destroyed and replaced by another that was more in line with the Anglo-Saxon worldview.Rather than face rejection, most authors, pressured by their own academies to publish internationally, would agree, despite the loss of 'voice' that this entailed.
This argument, which has since been built on by other scholars such as Karnedi (2015) and Bordet (2016), understands the hegemony of the English language in the globalized world as a form of 'linguistic imperialism' (cf.Pennycook, 1994;Phillipson, 1992), leading toward an epistemological monoculture in which alternative knowledges would have no place (Bennett, 2015).However, since then, all kinds of demographic and technological shifts have taken place which makes this basic premise less easy to sustain.The fact that languages now come into contact like never before as a result of unprecedented migration and technological advances, and that entire generations have grown up in postcolonial and diaspora contexts with two or more languages as their 'mother' tongues, has led to the development of a new perspective that presents itself as a major paradigm shift in the way language behavior is understood: the so-called multi-or translingual paradigm. 1 Thus, in this article, I aim to see what happens to the theory of epistemicide when viewed through the lens of the new paradigm.It begins by rehearsing the old argument of why academic translation is a form of epistemicide, before going on to discuss how the concept has been affected by the multi-or translingual paradigm and its implications for academic translation research.But first let us look at the 'world system of languages' (de Swaan, 2002;Heilbron, 2000) as it appeared to us up until very recently, focusing particularly upon those languages that have served as vehicles of knowledge.

Academic translation as epistemicide
Over the course of world history, many different languages have served as lingua francas of knowledge.Gordin's (2015) very complete survey mentions Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Chinese and Russian as well as the various artificial languages created in the 17th century following the demise of Latin.In the 1930s and 1940s, the constellation of European languages had three main academic languages of more-or-less equal status: English, French and German (Gordin, 2015: 7).However, after the Second World War, things started to change.With the rise of the United States to superpower status, English gained prestige and status in relation to the other two and began to pull away from its main rivals.At a certain point, probably around the turn of the millennium, a tipping-point was reached, when the very fact of its hypercentrality generated a momentum that became self-perpetuating.That is to say, the more prestigious it became, the more people wanted to use it, provoking what Abram de Swaan (2002), through analogy with the stock exchange, calls a 'stampede' into English.With this, English became the language of international publications, conferences, training programs, and so on, creating a powerful center with a disadvantaged periphery (Canagarajah, 2002a) and a semiperiphery pressured by centripetal forces (Bennett, 2014a).
The implications for translation were significant.As Heilbron (2000) has pointed out with regard to literary texts, the prestige of a language affects the translation economy, impinging not only on the volume of works translated but also the direction of the flow and strategies used.Consequently, new knowledge (the fruits of cutting-edge research, destined to be consumed exclusively by specialists) circulates in English and when not written directly in that language, is translated into it from the language in which conceived.Established knowledge, however (i.e.knowledge that is no longer contested but has been accepted as consensual by the specialist community), is translated from English into other languages on the periphery of system for dissemination among the broader community in the form of textbooks, popularizations, scientific journalism, and so on (Wright, 2011: Section 17.5).
There are important epistemological implications of these translation flows.Given the centrality of English Academic Discourse (EAD) as the vehicle of knowledge in the world, English rhetorical patterns and text structures dominate the translational process in both directions.When translations are into English, translations tend to be target-oriented as knowledge created in other languages is domesticated to suit Anglophone norms.Translation out of English, however, tends to be more source-oriented, with the result that English structures are calqued onto other languages, becoming absorbed into the language over time to produce mirror-image discourses in that language.
The reason why this is epistemicidal, rather than merely stylistic, is because EAD has a particular epistemology encoded into its very structure.Historically, the discourse was forged during the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century to serve as a tool for the new kind of knowledge that was being created at the time (then called natural philosophy).Defining itself in opposition to the text-based scholarship that had dominated till then this scientific discourse aimed, above all, to describe the physical world as clearly and objectively as possible, reducing the observer to a minimum and shifting the focus onto the object of observation (Halliday and Martin, 1993).What is more, it is based on two fundamental premises that have largely gone unquestioned in the Anglophone world: the existence of an extralinguistic world that can be perceived equally by everyone and known through observation and experiment (the philosophy of knowledge known as empiricism); and the belief that language, when plain and unadorned, 2 can offer a transparent window onto that extralinguistic reality by naming those observed things as precisely as possible and using simple sentences to indicate the relationships between them (linguistic realism).These values are systematically manifested in the exhortations to transparency, clarity and objectivity found in the many academic style manuals on the market, and they are applied as much to humanities and social science scholarship as to hard science (Bennett, 2009).The reason for this is that science has acquired such prestige in the modern world that it has colonized adjacent disciplines (Halliday and Martin, 1993: 84).That is to say, historians, literary scholars and philosophers have effectively had to write like scientists in order to acquire credibility and become candidates for funding.
However, scientific objectivity is a linguistic construct.Although it presents itself as offering a transparent window onto the extralinguistic world, producing simple statements of fact without any authorial manipulation, it is only achieved by using structures that were specifically developed for purpose, such as nominalizations and impersonal verb forms, 3 which thrust the focus of attention onto the things being observed, with the complete elimination of the subjective observer.As John Swales (1990: 112) points out (with reference to the discourse of Robert Boyle), a great deal of rhetorical skill is required to give the impression that the facts are speaking for themselves.
As a powerful discursive formation (Foucault, 2002(Foucault, [1969]]: 41), bolstered by very tangible connections with technology, industry and capitalism, and, on the symbolic plane, by a grand narrative (Lyotard, 1984(Lyotard, [1979]]) which naturalized it, EAD had, by the last decades of the 20th century, become totalitarian. 4In the Anglosphere, it had no contenders, having colonized all other scholarly discourses and deprived literary, narrative and mythical modes of cognitive authority by a variety of textual and non-textual means.Hence, it was only at the interface with other linguacultures that these power dynamics actually became visible.
I first became aware that other scholarly discourses -and indeed other theories of knowledge -existed when I was asked to translate Portuguese humanities writing into English for publication in English-language journals in the early 1990s.Traditional Portuguese scholarly discourse was grounded in values that were diametrically opposed to those transported by EAD. 5 A descendent of the elaborate Ciceronian rhetoric espoused by Catholic regimes following the Reformation, it valued abundant and complex speech as a good in itself, reveling in long subordinated sentences, high-register diction, and dazzling rhetorical effects.In short, it was closer to a literary style than a scientific one, and a world away from the objectivity, economy, and precision valued by EAD (Bennett, 2010a).
The challenges raised for translation were immense.In order to bring it into a form that was publishable, I found that I had to change these texts very substantially, breaking up the long-subordinated sentences into shorter ones, eliminating redundancy and overtly poetic or emotive elements, and replacing the high-register classical-sounding terms with something closer to everyday speech.I would also reformulate sentences to shift the focus away from human subject onto the object of study, simplify the vocabulary to make it less erudite and literary, and even reorganize paragraphs in order to put the most important information in first position.
In the following extract from the introduction of a Portuguese history article submitted to me for translation in 2010, 6 the main topic (highlighted in bold) is deferred using a series of parallelisms (italics).These are all participle phrases with a textual or interpersonal function, in that their role is to focus reflexively on the process of argumentation ('Partindo da premissa que [. ..] sabendo-se que [. . .] entendendo que [. ..] não podemos deixar de notar que [. ..]'; 'Starting from the premise that [. ..] and knowing that [. ..] and understanding that [. ..] we cannot fail to note that [. ..]') and they build up to create suspense, so that when the main clause finally arrives, it produces an effect of resolution and arrival.What is more, the factual information is not presented directly, as would be expected in classic EAD, but is embedded in an interpersonal framework that foregrounds the textual structure and reader/writer relationship.The cohesion is also different: there are few logical relations of type that we are used to seeing in English academic texts but instead the phenomena is presented circumstantially, as things that present themselves to the historian without any obvious relationship between them:

Literal translation
Starting from the premise that, in the Early Modern period, access to certain goods and services indicated the social, material and cultural distance of individuals and knowing that, from early on, the different kingdoms were concerned to create obstacles to the consumption of luxury goods, through legislation, accentuating the differences between social groups and understanding that luxury damaged the good order of the kingdom due to the exit of money, we cannot fail to note that the possession of realty and chattels indicated the place of each one in society.Thus thought the theoreticians of the economy and social order and thus thought the moralists, only starting to be manifested dissonant voices during the 18th century.
I have argued that this reflects the phenomenological stance dominant in humanities cultures of Continental Europe, in which the data are not presented as incontrovertible objective fact but as something filtered through perception of historian, with the relationship between these observations deliberately left vague, presumably to leave the path open for multiple interpretations.
At the time I was doing the translation, this kind of structure was quite alien to English, and, coming from a largely unknown author without the status of a Foucault (see below), it would have been considered bad style.Hence, in my final version, the paragraph was reorganized to put the main point at the beginning (effectively creating a topic sentence); all interpersonal references were removed so that 'facts' are presented directly, and logical relations (causal linkers and other cohesive devices, underlined) are imposed.Consequently, the phenomenological episteme that underlies the original has been replaced by a positivistic one:

Final domesticated translation
In the Early Modern period, the social, material and cultural position of individuals could be judged by the access that they had to certain goods and services.However, from early on, many kingdoms tried to block the consumption of luxury goods through legislation on the grounds that such items drained the financial resources of the country, leading to disarray (this belief was shared by both theoreticians of the social/economic order and by moralists, and which persisted through to the 18 th century, when dissenting voices started to be heard).This legislation accentuated the differences between social groups, with the result that the ownership of property, both realty and chattels, offered a reliable indication of an individual's status in society.
There have been a number of other studies pointing in the same direction, and although they did not use the word 'epistemicide', they were basically saying the same.For example, Bruno Bettelheim (1984) in his little book entitled Freud and Man's Soul argues that the English translations of Freud completely reworked Freud to present him as scientist when his background was humanistic (manifested through introduction of technical terminology and elimination of word 'soul' and replacement by 'mind').Lawrence Venuti (2010) looks at Arthur Goldhammer's translations of French historian Alain Corbin and the epistemological consequences of the neutralization of his rich literary language.Similar transformations have been attested with relation to the English translations of Hegel (Charlston, 2018) and Adorno (Baumgarten, 2018).
Despite this, the process is not quite as linear as it may first have seemed.A more recent study of Foucault in English translation (Bennett, 2017) found that the dominant translation strategy used was actually the opposite: the translation reproduced the structure and cadences of Foucault's own (long and complex) sentences so faithfully and made so few concessions to the target reader's knowledge and expectations that it is difficult to read in English.This can largely be explained as a function of the author's status: a celebrity intellectual in France at the time the translations were made, Foucault's prose was treated with respect.However, I argued, this translation strategy did bring repercussions for how the philosopher was received in the Anglophone world, where he was regarded as a much more radical and difficult author than he ever was in French.

Tectonic shifts: The multi-or translingual paradigm
The first indications that the imperialistic model that underpins the epistemicide trope might be losing its explanatory power began to appear about 15 years ago.One of the first works to specifically make this point was Alistair Pennycook's (2007: 5-6) volume Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, which argues that English 'cannot be usefully understood in modernist states-centric models of imperialism or world Englishes, or in terms of traditional, segregationist models of language' because it is now a 'translocal language, a language of fluidity and fixity that moves across, while becoming embedded in, the materiality of localities and social relations'.
One of the inspirations for these claims may well have been another volume co-edited by Pennycook himself that came out that same year, entitled Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007), which starts from the premise that 'languages, conceptions of languageness and the metalanguages used to describe them are inventions' (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007: 1).Arguing that linguistic criteria alone are insufficient to establish the existence of a language (as distinct from a dialect), the editors, in their introduction, identify a whole range of social, semiotic, and metalinguistic processes 7 that have been used by nation-states to artificially demarcate a linguistic territory that they lay claim to as their own, and urge the need to rethink (or 'disinvent') national languages in order to undo some of the 'epistemic violence' (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007: 16-21) that has been committed in their name.
One of the authors contributing to the Makoni and Pennycook (2007) volume with a chapter looking at what happens after disinvention was A. Suresh Canagarajah (2007), whose earlier works on the geopolitics of academic discourse (2002a) and critical academic discourse (2002b) had contributed greatly to my own epistemicide model.Now, however, Canagarajah was changing tack.In a new book, published in 2013, called Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations, he builds on Pennycook's (2007: 2) notion of transcultural flows to insist that the forces of globalization, particularly mass migration and technological developments, have engendered new communicative modes that are linguistically hybrid and performative, and that English, as the language most people use for contact purposes, participates in a very special way in these translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2013: 12), making it deserving of special (re)consideration.Indeed, the new paradigm announced by Canagarajah (2013) not only transcends individual languages but also verbal language itself, since it involves not only words but also 'diverse semiotic resources and ecological affordances' (p. 6).
A third work that needs to be mentioned in the context of this paradigm shift is Blommaert's (2010) Sociolinguistics of Globalization, which calls for a whole new theory to describe the linguistic reality of the globalized world.He too opposes the 'linguistic imperialism' model (p.22) as inadequate to deal with the phenomenon of 'superdiversity' (Vertovec, 2007) that characterizes contemporary linguistic relations, and proposes instead a 'sociolinguistics of mobility' that would focus 'not on languagein-place but on language-in-motion' (Blommaert, 2010: 5-7), with the term 'semiotic resources' replacing 'language' (p.47) as the unit of analysis.
To some extent, these developments represent the culmination of a process that began several decades ago as the perceived bond between nation, territory, and language (the so-called 'Herderian triad') began to be eroded, along with the 'myth of monolingualism' which accompanied it. 8The first stage probably occurred when Kachru (1985) blurred the traditional boundary between the native and non-native speaker by creating an intermediary category to account for those speakers of English for whom English was neither a mother tongue nor a truly foreign language, but rather a 'second language', acquired since childhood through formal education systems in the countries of the former British Empire.This 'World Englishes' model, as it came to be called, not only legitimized new varieties of English (e.g.Indian English, Nigerian English, Singaporean English, etc.), which now began to vie with British and American as alternative standards, but also drew attention to the fact that, across much of the colonized world, people grew up in situations that oblige them to work with various languages on a daily basis.
The International English (or Global English) model, which dominated in the 1990s, conceived English as a culturally neutral and universal vehicular language, with an emphasis on instrumentality in an increasingly interconnected world (Crystal, 1997;Graddol, 1999).This eroded the hierarchical model further by placing nonnative speakers of English on a more-or-less equal footing with native speakers.However, the proponents of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) (Jenkins, 2007(Jenkins, , 2011(Jenkins, , 2015;;Mauranen, 2012;Seidlhofer, 2011) took this even further.Given that the number of multilingual users of English now vastly exceeded monolinguals, these authors argued that English could no longer be considered the property of 'native speakers' but deserved to be regarded as a variety in its own right.This meant effectively legitimizing features calqued from other languages, provided that intelligibility is not impeded.
Of course, the difficulty with considering ELF a 'variety' is that it is impossible to codify, acquiring different features in different parts of the globe in accordance with the other languages of its speakers.This has, in turn, led to the demise of the whole notion of a standard, with linguist Edgar Schneider (2016) going as far as to claim that English can no longer be considered a language at all, or even a set of varieties, but should rather be considered 'a globally available resource for speakers [. ..] employing it for their own communicative purposes in creative ways' (p.340).Like Makoni and Pennycook (2007), mentioned earlier, Schneider considers that the way English is being used in the present age is better reflected by the notion of 'translanguaging', that is, the act of building on a single repertoire drawn from various language (García and Wei, 2014). 9 In Translation Studies, the debunking of the 'myth of monolingualism' has brought wide-ranging implications for translation theory and practice.Entering the field through postcolonial translation studies (e.g.Bandia, 2008;Bassnett and Trivedi, 1999), and extended to multilingual states like Belgium (Meylaerts, 2006) and Canada (Grutman, 2006), the emphasis has been on the translation of complex source texts that are linguistically hybrid or 'heterolingual', though it has also brought a new interest in self-translation, as a practice specific to multilingual authors (e.g.Antunes and Grutman, 2014;Cordingley, 2013).These undermine the classic binaries upon which translation theory has conventionally rested -the distinctions between source and target language, author and translator, translator and reader -bringing significant challenges for translation theory, as well as practice.
Hence, in what follows, I am interested in trying to explore the implications of these developments for academic translation practice and research.How is our understanding of cross-cultural communication in the academic domain affected by this paradigm shift?

Implications for academic translation: Practice
One of the main consequences of the demise of the 'linguistic imperialism' model is a loss of clarity as regards what constitutes the 'correct' way to write.The old dictionaryand grammar-based prescriptivism, grounded in 'native-speaker' norms, has given way to a new emphasis on practice as constitutive of form and meaning, an attitude which empowers 'non-native' speakers (or 'speakers of English as an additional language', as they are now called), who have more freedom to express themselves using rhetorical patterns drawn from other languages.In the informal communicative situations studied by Pennycook (2007), Blommaert (2010) and Canagarajah (2013), and the literary representations of border practices found in much postcolonial and diaspora writing, 10 linguistic hybridity has become the new norm, created by inserting unglossed words, phrases, or passages from a first language; by using concepts, allusions, or references that may be unknown to the reader; by syntactic fusion; by codeswitching; by transforming literary language with vernacular syntax or rhythms; or even by generating a particular cultural music in their prosody.(Ashcroft, 2014: 56) Academic writing, in contrast, is more conservative and has, till recently, resisted this kind of flexibility.Tightly imbricated with the power structures of the modern world, EAD has traditionally been promoted through multi-million-dollar language industries 11 and protected by powerful gatekeepers, who have sought to 'maintain standards' by excluding any that fail to reproduce its formulae.As a result, authors from non-anglophone cultures have often felt obliged to force their thoughts into rhetorical patterns determined by a hegemonic power with which they do not identify or risk international invisibility.Chan (2016: 153-154), borrowing from the postcolonial tradition, conceptualizes such second-language writing as a form of self-translation, in the sense that it involves a 'representation of the Self in the language of the Other' (Bandia, 2008: 163-164).
However, in recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in attitude toward English in academic circles, analogous to that which occurred in postcolonial contexts in the second generation. 12Even before Jenkins (2011) and Mauranen (2012) formally introduced ELF into the academic field, there had been some ideologically motivated attempts to encourage forms of hybridity or métissage that allowed identities to be expressed while enabling speakers to participate in global conversations (see, for example, Canagarajah's [2002b] classroom experiments; see also Ivanič, 1998), as well as calls to introduce more creativity into what was beginning to be perceived as an over-standardized and therefore stultified discourse (e.g.Swales, 2017).Today, EAD is by no means as rigid as it was, and there is evidence that it is now opening up to other voices and epistemologies.Expressions that would have been considered wrong a few decades ago but are now quite widespread include phrases such as 'the present article' for textual selfreference, the use of 'science/scientific' to refer to research in the arts and humanities; and lexical items such as 'defence', 'rector', and 'principal investigator' instead of 'viva', 'vice-chancellor', and 'lead/head researcher', respectively.In the humanities and social sciences, where French poststructuralism and hermeneutic philosophies have been powerful influences, there is evidence that features imported from scholarly discourses grounded in quite different epistemologies have already become naturalized.For example, we now often see the word 'imaginary' used as a noun to refer to the symbolic universe created by a culture (e.g.'the Portuguese imaginary'), and 'reality' employed to refer to something very similar (e.g.'the Portuguese reality'), thereby overturning the commonsense English opposition between the real and the imaginary; and 'guiding thread' now sometimes appears as the English version of fil rouge or fil conducteur, bringing in its wake a whole different attitude to text construction that is not as rigidly hierarchical and pre-planned, as taught in all the EAD manuals, but somewhat more diffuse, often following the author's thought processes in a looser and less recursive style.
What seems to have tipped the balance is the demographics.Today, most of the authors publishing in international journals are multilingual scholars for whom English is an additional language rather than a 'native' one, and, even more significantly, the bulk of the gatekeepers (i.e.editors, peer reviewers, academic mentors) are too.It is surely this fact that has led to the (perhaps unwitting) acceptance and perpetuation of practices that do not have their source in British or American usage but represent calques and importations from other languages.
As a consequence, academic translators working into English do not need to radically domesticate foreign texts in the way they had to some years ago.Certainly, I myself no longer feel the need to impose classic English structures on the texts I translate, but instead allow myself to follow the rhetorical patterns of the source text more closely.In the case of the history extract described earlier, for example, I would today be more inclined to present the more literal translation of the passage as my final version without feeling the need to reformulate so drastically.
ELF now has a more marked presence in the texts produced by academic institutions, even if it is not explicitly labeled as such.Following the example set by many European universities, we have recently taken the step of translating our faculty website into a more comprehensible, less culturally bound form of English, and although some Portuguese colleagues were initially opposed on the grounds of 'correctness', they mostly came round when they realized that our version of ELF was actually the kind of English that they themselves were using on a daily basis on the (mistaken) assumption that it was British.
Hence, there is evidence in the academic domain that the prescriptive attitude is finally giving way to one that is more practice-driven, in the sense that norms are now being set by users rather than by authorities.

Implications for academic translation: Research
Perhaps the most significant result of the changes described earlier is that, with the increasing irrelevance of the linguistic imperialism model, the concept of epistemicide is no longer as productive as it once was in the academic context. 13Instead, we need to ask ourselves how knowledge flows might be studied within the multilingual paradigm and what the implications might be for translation theory and practice more broadly.
There are a number of directions that such research could now take, some of which have already begun to be rehearsed.For example, it would be useful to study the translational processes (interlingual, intralingual, and intersemiotic) involved when multilingual scholars write up their research for publication in English and to trace the various third-party interventions in it.There have already been some longitudinal studies of this nature, though the most significant are by sociologists or linguists, rather than translation scholars, and consequently make no explicit reference to translation.For example, Chapter 5 of Knorr Cetina's (1981: 94-135) landmark book, The Manufacture of Knowledge traces the process of scientific text production from rough notes to final research article; while Lillis and Curry's (2010) Academic Writing in a Global Context uses a text-oriented ethnographic approach to document the various revisions and rewritings needed to put the work of 50 academic authors from non-Anglophone cultures into publishable form.However, my own study of the strategies used by Portuguese social science and humanities scholars to get their work published in English (Bennett, 2010b) did focus more explicitly on translation and paratranslational activities, and revealed a whole spectrum of different strategies including writing the text directly in English; writing it in English with revision by a native speaker; writing in Portuguese and then selftranslating into English; writing in Portuguese and having it translated by a non-native-speaker colleague or acquaintance, perhaps with revision by a native speaker; writing in Portuguese and having it translated by a native-speaker colleague or acquaintance; having it translated by a professional translator or submitting the text in Portuguese to the publisher, who then has the text translated by 'their' translator.What this showed was that translation in the academic context is emphatically not a binary activity involving two people (author and translator) and two texts (source text/target text or original/ translation), but rather a continuum of adaptation and co-authorship.
If my study were to be repeated today, it would be necessary to factor in recent technological developments by taking account of machine translation (MT) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, which are increasingly being used by academics to save time and money in the production of English-language texts.The fact that such systems are trained on vast corpora of (human-and machine-produced) data opens up opportunities for research into subjects such as the recycling of discourse segments (which may lead to the importation of terms without proper consideration of the theories in which they are embedded) and the production of discourse norms, which, as we have seen, are no longer overseen by authoritative bodies, but are generated through practice and reproduced unchecked in cyberspace.Today, these legitimately fall under the purview of translation studies on the grounds that they involve the transposition of elements from one environment to another and a study of the conditions under which this occurs.
Self-translation, in the conventional sense as 'the translation of an original work into another language by the author himself' (Popovič, 1976: 19), is another potential interesting category for academic translation research that has barely been investigated to date. 14Verena Jung's (2002) English-German Self-Translation of Academic Texts and Its Relevance for Translation Theory and Practice -the most detailed investigation to date -begins with a series of internal distinctions borrowed from Popovič (1976: 22-29; translation into the mother tongue versus translation into the foreign language, unaided vs co-authored translation, homoskopic vs heteroskopic, and simultaneous vs delayed) which blur into a continuum when applied to her corpus.What is more, the fact that her ostensible self-translators, like the multilingual scholars studied by Lillis and Curry (2010), admit receiving help from author's editors and other literacy brokers (Jung, 2002: 24-25, 37) suggests that there also exists a 'continuum of co-authorship' (Bennett, 2020: 186) in academic writing that often goes unacknowledged.
The (ostensibly monolingual) academic artifact can also be studied as a kind of translation, in the sense that, in the current context of increased language contact, it inevitably incorporates traces of different voices accumulated through the author's readings and debates.The new field of Genetic Translation Studies (e.g.Cordingley and Montini, 2015;Nunes et al., 2020) might offer a methodological framework for this kind of study that could help (through the study of authors' plans, drafts, notes, and correspondence) to establish if code-switching and linguistic hybridity are present in the pretextual phase as the disciplinary discourse is negotiated and terminological equivalences are sought, and in what language(s) the authors are thinking during the project-design, literature review, data-collection, and planning stages.Potentially fruitful notions here might be those of the intertext, defined by Jung (2002) as 'a collective knowledge distilled from a multiplicity of texts read by the authors or even language usage that they have absorbed ' (p. 19) and which forms part of the 'pre-stage of the original' (p.30), 15 and Anthony Pym's (1998: 177-192) interculture, the transitional zone of cultural and linguistic overlaps and intersections in which real-life translators live and work.Modern academia, I have suggested (Bennett, 2020) might be an example of such an interculture which could be studied from a translational perspective.
Other potential areas of study might involve the following: (1) looking at how EAD as a system is changing in response to the new demands being made upon it; (2) focusing on knowledge-making practices at the intersection of cultures including oral situations (fieldwork, conferences, tutorials, coffee breaks), as well as written texts; (3) considering the multiple semiotic resources used in knowledge-making, including intersemiotic translation and multimodality; and (5) studying how amateur translation, in the sense of overwriting, is used to produce new knowledge in web contexts and elsewhere (e.g.Dolmaya, 2017).
Finally, we can look at how translation in the broader sense can be used to understand the processes involved in the construction of knowledge more generally, as theories, methods, and terminology are transported (interlingually, intralingually, and intersemiotically) to new linguistic, cultural, and epistemological contexts.This could have a historical focus (see, for example, Bennett, 2023) or be more synchronic and descriptive in orientation.It may also include translation between different epistemic systems, examining how scientific knowledge is repackaged in literary works, journalism, or popularizations, or how knowledges from very different cultures (e.g. the indigenous of Global South), can be translated into forms that are meaningful in the North and vice versa.Known as (inter-)epistemic translation (Robinson, 2017: 200-203), this has already become the focus of the EPISTRAN project (Epistemic Translation: Toward an Ecology of Knowledges), launched recently at the Nova University of Lisbon (see Bennett, 2024). 16

Conclusion
In the light of the political and economic upheavals taking place in the world today, we might end this article by asking whether English will remain the lingua franca of academia for much longer.After all, lingua francas have historically come and gone in accordance with shifts in the substrata that support them (Gordin, 2015;Ostler, 2011), and there is absolutely nothing to guarantee that it will behave any differently from Greek, Persian, Sanskrit, Latin or any of the other scholarly languages that have preceded it.
In the short-and medium-term, a number of scenarios are possible.To my mind, one of the most likely, foreshadowed to some extent by the developments described in this article, is that academic English will absorb so many influences from other languages that it will develop in a quite different direction from informal 'native-speaker' varieties, becoming a scholarly lingua franca that is no one's mother tongue.Like Scholastic Latin in the Middle Ages, it will be acquired as a second language through formal education and used in universities and scholarly publications throughout the world but may not be recognizable as the same tongue that is used informally on the streets of London or New York.
Another (perhaps less likely) scenario is that, in the wake of economic and political shifts, a new international lingua franca might emerge to take the place of English and impose itself through authoritarian policies or soft power.Alternatively, different lingua francas might develop for different academic domains on the understanding that particular kinds of knowledge are best expressed in particular languages.There already exist networks in French, Spanish, and Portuguese (for example) for the promotion of culturally embedded scholarship (literature, history, etc) relating to their geographical areas of influence; likewise, much discussion of philosophy already takes place in German rather than English.It is not inconceivable that such alternative non-Anglophone networks might proliferate in the coming years in the recognition that humanities and social science knowledge cannot be easily detached from the language in which it was conceived, leaving EAD to specialize as the vehicular language for the more 'universal' knowledge of the hard sciences.
A final possibility is that the multilingualism currently challenging the uniformity of EAD might return us to a situation like that which prevailed in Early Modern Europe before linguistic nationalisms had taken hold, when individuals were expected to function routinely with several languages, and monolingualism was an exception (Bennett and Cattaneo, 2022;Hokenson and Munson, 2007).This time round, however, our transactions will be mediated by technology.In 2010, Nicholas Ostler predicted that English would prove to be the last ever lingua franca as we move back into a translation economy, mediated by cheap and ubiquitous translation devices, and clearly, with the rise of MT, AI and the ubiquitous smart phone, this has already happened to some extent.
However, Ostler's (2011) conclusion -that 'nation shall speak unto nation each in its own language, relying on the global network to make its national messages understood' (p.266) -seems counter-intuitive in a world where those national languages already come into contact on a daily basis, not only in cosmopolitan cities and online environments, but also in universities and at academic conferences.If I were to put my money on what the outcome will be in our own lifetime, I would wager that multilingualism is back to stay, and that it will be manifested in humanities and social sciences departments by a generalized requirement to understand several different languages in recognition of the culturally embedded nature of meaning.I also predict that academic journals and conferences will become increasingly multilingual -opening up to a few dominant languages at the beginning, and then taking advantage of the technology on hand to offer more and more.This does not necessarily imply the end of EAD, rather, a recognition of its limitations and a readiness to mobilize some of the alternative modes of communication that are already on offer.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: This research was financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, through CETAPS' strategic programme, references UIDB/04097/2020 and UIDP/04097/2020.

Notes
1.Among the various proponents of this paradigm, Canagarajah (2013) alone uses 'translingualism' on the grounds that the languages in the individual or culture's repertoire do not relate in a merely additive manner but rather 'mesh in transformative ways, generating new meanings and grammars' (p.8). 2. For more on the origins and implications of the Plain English movement, see Bennett (2019).3. See Halliday and Martin (1993) on the historical development of the nominalization in science discourse, Ding (1998) on the agentless passive, and Atkinson (1999) on the impersonal active.4. Cf.Kress (1985): 'discourses tend towards exhaustiveness and inclusiveness /. ../A discourse colonises the social world imperialistically, from the point of view of one institution' (p. 7). 5. Since then, this discourse has changed considerably through pressure from English.See Bennett (2014b) for a study of how Portuguese historiographic discourse changed between the first and second decades of the 21st century.6.From 'Do trabalho e dos patrimónios das Cristãs Novas nos séculos XVII e XVIII' by Isabel Drummond Braga, reproduced with the kind permission of the author.See Bennett (2015: 22-23) for a more detailed discussion of this passage and the challenges for translation.7.These include the transmission of colonial and nationalist ideology through literacy programs, the systematic erasure of rival dialects and languages within the national space, and