Identifying Linguistic Interferences From Spanish in Manuscripts by Non-Native English Speakers as a Translation-Related Phenomenon

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Scholars around the world experience pressure to publish their research in international journals almost exclusively in English. However, in the case of Non-Native English Speaking (NNES) authors, their manuscripts are often rejected by editors arguing language problems. Some of those problems are caused by linguistic interferences from the author’s primary language. Although linguistic interferences have been researched in the fields of contact linguistics, Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and Translation Studies (TS), the latter is in a privileged position to investigate the close relationship between editing non-native English and translation. Consequently, this thesis adopted Toury’s concept of assumed translation and Mossop’s mental translating to study interferences as translation-related phenomena. To connect theory and practice, this thesis analyzed a corpus composed of six manuscripts written by Colombian NNES authors whose mother tongue is Spanish. Those original manuscripts, although written in English, are studied here as exhibiting products of mental translating from Spanish because they contain multiple interferences from that language. Said interferences were collected in a database using a procedure proposed here to classify interferences and a classification to categorize them. The findings confirm that interferences are common in this corpus, and they are of multiple kinds. Furthermore, they were identified and classified as interferences because their assumed original segments could be reconstructed (applying Toury’s ideas) as Spanish back-translations. A data validation process with random sampling established (with 90% statistical confidence) that over 84% of the interferences identified in the corpus were not present in the published articles. Translators can be particularly well equipped to work as authors’ editors if they share the same primary language. Hence, translator training should teach translation students control over interference so that they can successfully play this role in the flourishing international publishing industry.