The Silent Costs of English Dominance in Korean Scholarship

Author: Eun-seo Han — Professor of Linguistics, Korea University

Every Korean academic who writes for a global audience carries two manuscripts — the one that gets submitted, and the one that never quite survives translation. The gap between them is not a failure of language. It is a record of what the academy chooses not to hear.

For Korean scholars seeking recognition in international academia, publishing in English-language journals is no longer an option but an expectation. This requirement is often framed as a neutral gateway to global visibility, a practical response to the fact that English currently functions as a shared medium of academic exchange. Yet this narrative obscures an asymmetry. The labour of translation — intellectual, emotional, and cultural — falls overwhelmingly on non-Anglophone scholars.

Much of what is lost in translation is not technical content but epistemic nuance. Korean academic writing, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, draws on rhetorical traditions that value indirection, relationality, and a careful calibration of stance. When we strip these away to meet the stylistic expectations of international journals, we do more than adjust the surface form. We reshape how knowledge is framed: what counts as evidence, how disagreement is signaled, and whose experience is treated as central.

The politics of this linguistic asymmetry are especially visible in fields that study language, culture, and education themselves. A Korean linguist publishing on Seoul dialect change or on classroom discourse at a Korean university is often asked to justify why their case matters beyond Korea, as though English-speaking contexts were self-evidently general while Korean ones were local and particular.

Moving toward more equitable norms will require more than asking individual scholars to “write better English.” It demands institutional changes on both sides of the linguistic divide. International journals can start by valuing multilingual citation practices. Editorial boards can recruit reviewers who read Korean. Funding agencies can recalibrate incentives so that publishing in Korean, for Korean publics and classrooms, is not treated as a secondary activity.

At the same time, Korean institutions might invest in infrastructures that support multilingual scholarship — parallel publication policies, collaborative translation programs that treat translation as co-authorship, and digital platforms that make Korean-language research more discoverable internationally. That recognition is the starting point for any meaningful conversation about language, power, and the future of Korean scholarship in a global academy.