Publishing

[Guillaume Jacques]

Dear all,

I would like to add another comment to Rob's message. While in Northern
India English appears to be relatively widespread, in other countries, in
particular Tibetan areas of China and Nepal, fluency in English is rather
rare. As such, in order to reach the native speakers, those of us who work
in these countries should publish at least part of their work, especially
the dictionaries and the text collections, in a format accessible to the
native speakers (in Nepali in the case of Nepal and in Chinese or Tibetan
for China). In my view, publishing a dictionary of a language of China or
Nepal without the national language (with English-only glosses) is simply
irresponsible.

Thus, I think that our community should value more the production of
dictionaries and text collections including translations in the local
national languages, not just in English (or even only in the local
languages, without English), even if this kind of publication never get
cited. Citation-based evaluation of academic productivity has a highly
detrimental effect on the field, and evaluators should really make a
special case for non-English publications intended for speakers of the
endangered languages.

Guillaume

-- 
Guillaume Jacques
CNRS (CRLAO) - INALCO
http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques
http://himalco.hypotheses.org/
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