It is fine to publish a study in English on the Spanish, as long as you are very careful to point out to the English readers the subtleties of culture and language that may not be well known.

Dear Ian Kennedy:

But, writing in Spanish, for example, you facilitate access to research results to Spanish speakers, who are the main users of this information.

Sincerely,

Reynaldo

Dear Reynaldo, I think it is an excellent idea to publish in the language of the people being studied when possible. At the moment, I am studying people in Sierra Leone, where the local language is Krio and Rwanda, where the language is Kinyarwanda. I don't think there are very good opportunities to publish the sort of academic work we do in those two languages. However, in Spanish there are many journals. You can look at Julio Frenk, the Dean of Faculty at the Harvard University School of Public Health, and you can see that he does sometimes publish in Spanish. You can also see that many of his English-language articles are in high-impact journals, such as Lancet. I do not know Dean Frenk myself, but I imagine one dilemma for very high-rank academics like him, there must be a trade-off such between publishing in the highest-rank journals, which are most often in English and publishing in what appear to be mostly Mexican journals where some of his studies are set. One interesting trend these days is that many journals are requiring an abstract to be in two languages, English, and another one, which is an opportunity to reach out to the population studied at least a bit. English is so dominant in the world of research that many journals in European languages publish in their native language, but also publish articles in English as well, usually with just in abstract in their own language, say, French. You also mentioned the translation of instruments from English to other languages; I thought I'd mention, in case you are not aware, that the World Health Organization has a document on this: http://www.who.int/substance_abuse/research_tools/translation/en/. Personally, I do think it is extremely difficult to capture all cultural nuances in translations, and ideally if an instruments will be used in more than one language (for example in the US, it's often known in advance that English and Spanish versions will be needed) it's best to develop them simultaneously. This can keep the two instruments as consistent as possible. Bob

@Reynaldo: I also advocate publishing in Spanish! I was answering your last question, not your headline question, which is self-evidently correct, except for small population groups. Robert has expanded well on my opinions.

Hi Reynaldo, this has nothing to do with your question, but based on your research interests, I thought you might be interested in an old paper of mine: "Student and course factors predicting satisfaction in undergraduate courses at Harvard University." It's on page 4 of my profile. Bob