This summer, I participated in two very stimulating international conferences where hundreds of scholars (sociologists, geographers, urbanists mainly) gathered and exchanged ideas. On numerous occasions I witnessed speakers struggling to convey their thought on the state of their research because of their insufficient knowledge of English. Beside the instances where the speaker barely could articulate a sentence in English, one could also mention the interesting cases of Mexicans presenters being asked questions in English by a Spanish listener or a largely French audience being welcome in English by a French speaker who had difficulties reading her English text. (On a personal note I could also mention the time spent at preparing not the actual content or structure of my presentation but at finding out and practicing how you pronounce some of the words...)
If we accept that each has a valuable contribution to make, then it seems to me (taking into account another discussion I started too long ago…) that we can either accept the status quo or question its legitimacy. We could consider it is to everyone individual responsibility to master English, or we could propose that everyone, including English native speakers who are necessarily favored by this situation, has a responsibility to address the issue.
My question is : could we imagine different ways of exchanging ideas that would allow to mitigate, in part, the inequalities inherent to English use in a conference?
For example could the question period more formally include time for this issue (translation questions and their implications, clarifications, questions asked in other languages)?
I have heard that international meetings like the World Social Forum have tackled the issue in the past but I do not know if they have an official position or strategies to address it. Do you?
Interesting, Daniela Soera, do you think this will lessen the use of English in Academia?
This issue increases for written purposes as non-native (English) speakers find tremendous problems to publish in English to reach a wider audience and gain international fame. Arabic-speaking scholars, mainly those of the Maghreb, need the assistance of translators who may not carry out the job acceptably for they are not specialists in all academic fields.
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