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Editors’ Introduction: The Importance of Translating

Editors’ Introduction: The Importance of Translating In recent decades, there is a marked tendency to legitimize academic endeavors as contributions to “innovation”, preferably in a form that leads to marketable commodities or otherwise fosters economic growth. This trend has worked to obfuscate an essential aspect of scholarly and scientific work, namely to make and keep accessible what has already been discovered and invented by the human mind. In fact, it should be obvious that “innovation” can only be measured against a standard of already extant knowledge, and that, therefore, the “storage” and “access” functions of scholarship are prerequisites for any meaningful “innovation”. However, academic institutions and funding organizations have been less willing to acknowledge the importance of work that, on first sight, seems to merely reproduce what is already there. Translations, which arguably play a seminal part in making and keeping extant knowledge and ideas accessible, have thus been ranked secondary at best, instead of being considered as genuine scholarly work. Academic employers, publishers and journal editors have prioritized “original research”, and academics have followed suit. Or so one might think when considering the relative scarcity of new translations over and against the number of other research publications.These tendencies have also affected research on Japan http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques de Gruyter

Editors’ Introduction: The Importance of Translating

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
0004-4717
eISSN
2235-5871
DOI
10.1515/asia-2017-0032
Publisher site
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Abstract

In recent decades, there is a marked tendency to legitimize academic endeavors as contributions to “innovation”, preferably in a form that leads to marketable commodities or otherwise fosters economic growth. This trend has worked to obfuscate an essential aspect of scholarly and scientific work, namely to make and keep accessible what has already been discovered and invented by the human mind. In fact, it should be obvious that “innovation” can only be measured against a standard of already extant knowledge, and that, therefore, the “storage” and “access” functions of scholarship are prerequisites for any meaningful “innovation”. However, academic institutions and funding organizations have been less willing to acknowledge the importance of work that, on first sight, seems to merely reproduce what is already there. Translations, which arguably play a seminal part in making and keeping extant knowledge and ideas accessible, have thus been ranked secondary at best, instead of being considered as genuine scholarly work. Academic employers, publishers and journal editors have prioritized “original research”, and academics have followed suit. Or so one might think when considering the relative scarcity of new translations over and against the number of other research publications.These tendencies have also affected research on Japan

Journal

Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques – de Gruyter

Published: Jun 27, 2017

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