Authorship and (self-)translation in academic writing: towards a genetic approach

According to a 2010 survey of Portuguese humanities and social science researchers (Bennett 2010a), self-translation plays a salient role in the production of academic texts for international publication, not only in the narrow sense of a redaction in English by the author of a text first written in Portuguese, but also in the form of a simplification or reformulation by the author of a previously existing Portuguese text in order to facilitate third-party translation into English. For some scholars (e.g. Chan 2016), the very act of writing an academic text in a foreign language is also a form of self-translation, which may bring levels of distress analogous to those reported in postcolonial and diaspora contexts. This article reflects on how Genetic Translation Studies might be used to further shed light on questions of authorship and (self-)translation in the academic context.