The conference in Koper went well. The speakers were from different backgrounds and engaged in different disciplines from philosophy, pedagogy and music to the natural sciences, translation studies and linguistics. This definitely added flavour to our discussions and opened up our horizons. I’m grateful to Sonja Starc and her team for that.
There’s only one thing that made me feel uneasy. Since it was an international conference I had a feeling that it was impolite to present a paper in Slovene, the local language, when participants came from six different countries. I really don’t think I’m less of a Slovene because I use English when I present a paper at a conference. International conferences aim to open up space for communication and exchange of views around a particular topic. Presenting in Slovene honestly hindered communication if you didn’t speak the language (even though there were two colleagues offereing consecutive translation into English).
We can pay respect to the Slovene language in other ways and at other times. I believe it is sufficient if the conference website and the conference programme offer information both in English and Slovene (other languages are also welcome), and that conference proceedings offer a longer summary of all papers in Slovene. This is also the practice we follow in the Editorial board of Scripta Manent.
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PS
And this was Mojca Jarc’s and my paper:
The long and winding road to international academic recognition: the case of Slovene social sciences authors
English has become the dominant language of scientific communication. In 2004, more than 90% of articles published in social sciences journals tracked by the ISI Web of Science were written in English language. Therefore, scholars from non-English speaking backgrounds have been increasingly under pressure to write in a foreign language if they wish to disseminate their research results in high impact journals and receive recognition (Lillis & Curry 2006; Lillis, Hewings & Vladimirou 2010). The comparative bibliometrical profile of research in Slovenia (Sorčan et al. 2008) showed that, in 2005, Slovene authors publishing in the field of social sciences ranked relatively low in terms of ISI Web of Science Country indicators. Although the implications of these figures need to be handled carefully, they nevertheless open the question of whether having to write and publish for international audiences hinders Slovene social sciences scholars’ access to mainstream academic journals. The aim of our paper therefore is to provide a much needed insight into the writing and publishing practices of Slovene social sciences authors in local and international contexts. Using a qualitative approach, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews to analyze the strategies Slovene authors use to construct their knowledge identities within a given scientific community.
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