English as a lingua franca in academic publishing: using round-trip translation to estimate linguistic revision difficulty

Abstract In this paper the feasibility of a novel method for estimating revision difficulty of academic texts to be published in English as a lingua franca (ELF) is examined with the purpose of optimizing revisors’ workflow and performance. In doing so, we also address the complex issue of linguistic standards in ELF academic productions from a new perspective. The method of automatic round-trip translation (RTT), which consists in machine-translating a text into another language and back into the source language, is applied in conjunction with BLEU, an automatic text similarity method traditionally used in machine translation evaluation. The similarity between a manuscript and its round-trip translation is calculated to obtain a priori evaluation of revision difficulty, and the efficacy and reliability of the method are tested. Alongside with the experimental research, some theoretical issues regarding ELF and the practice of revision in the hyperglobalized context of international academic publishing are discussed. The results of the experiments show that the RTT-based method can be successfully used to estimate revision difficulty. The variety of data used in the experiments demonstrates the applicability of the method beyond the cases under study. Some limitations and further developments of the study are also briefly discussed.