Global Publishing Opportunities in Gerontology: A View From the Editor's Desk

Global aging has proceeded at an unprecedented and accelerating rate. The aging of the population creates both opportunities and challenges for elders, their families, and society in general. Importantly, there is substantial variation in the effects of and response to global aging both within and across nations depending, in part, on prevailing cultural expectations and values, political and economic imperatives, and social and demographic characteristics. Thus, while some regions and countries have responded with innovative policies and programs to better enable the growing cohort of older adults to remain active and engaged in the community, other regions and countries have struggled with their response or barely begun to plan for the rising population of elders. This symposium assembles editors at five leading gerontological journals to demonstrate the role that peer-reviewed scholarship can play in disseminating knowledge that informs gerontological research, policy, and practice internationally. Editors include: Kyungmin Kim, PhD, Research on Aging; Jessica Kelley, PhD, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences; Edward Alan Miller, PhD, Journal of Aging & Social Policy; Julie Hicks Patrick, PhD, International Journal of Aging & Human Development; and Julie Robison, PhD, The Journal of Applied Gerontology. Each presenter will review the scope, content, and focus of their journals and the role and opportunities for international scholarship.

Culture-specific Items from Ukrainian and Russian Fairy Tales: A Daunting Challenge for Translators

Translation studies of children’s literature deserve meticulous attention today not only in the wake of active global publishing activity of books for children but due to the culture-specific information the latter may contain. Fairy tales are usually the first narratives children are introduced to and often these stories with a long-reproduction history reveal some features of national culture that form a child’s worldview. From this perspective, the research is set out to identify culture-specific items in fairy tales that originated from oral tradition and to determine what translation procedures should be used and what factors may influence the choice of the translation method. The corpus of the research includes the titles of East Slavic fairy tales limited by culture-specific items and their translations into English and German. Despite the period when translations were made and gender of translators, findings of our research show that in both languages source language-oriented translation procedures prevail in rendering proper names with denotative meaning, and target language-oriented translation methods are dominant for culture-specific common expressions and descriptive elements of proper names. The current research has allowed us to distinguish the factors that may influence the choice of a translation procedure. To this end, a scale of source language- and target language-oriented translation strategies of culture-specific items from fairy tales with the account of target reader’s age and genre has been provided for the translators to reveal the efficiency of certain translation procedures. Given the above, the study of culture-specific items in fairy tales requires a greater focus and thus further lines of inquiry are suggested in this paper.

García Márquez in China

This article studies the history of the introduction and translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s works into contemporary China. Based on thoroughly exploring each key step in the process of translation and reception of his works—including selection of source texts, adoption of translation strategies, identity of translators, criticisms of translation, and the arguments over the key concepts—the article disinters the differences of cultural contexts among various historical periods in which García Márquez was introduced and accepted in China. This article is composed of five parts. The first part gives an overview of the history of translation and reception of García Márquez in China. Part two elaborates on the paradox of the Chinese version of “magic(al) realism,” which is widely used in Chinese contemporary literature. Part three is an exposition of the impact of García Márquez being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the myth of the impact of the Latin American Boom on Chinese literature in the 1980s. Part four deeply discusses why the works of García Márquez are deemed “new classics” in China in the twenty-first century, despite having been left out in the 1990s. Part five concludes that the description of the history of translation of García Márquez for four decades not only uncovers how the global publishing market and the system of literary criticism managed by the West influence Chinese translated literature, but also reveals the ideological conflicts in China since the 1980s.

Structured inequalities and authors’ positionalities in academic publishing: The case of Philippine international migration scholarship

This article examines structured inequalities and authors’ positionalities in the academic publishing field. It uses Bourdieu’s insights in explaining the reproduction of publishing inequality and mobility through cultural capital and habitus modification. The article elaborates ‘positionality’ to constitute structure and agency through position and positioning, and situates academics in varying positionalities (insider, outsider, hybrid) in the global publishing field. Focusing on Filipino international migration scholarship, the article examines 392 journal articles from 1989 to 2018, and tracks the first authors’ ethnicity, institutional affiliation, and university where they received their PhD. The findings show that authors institutionally affiliated in the Global North (insiders) dominate the field (publication count and citations), while homeland-based Filipino scholars are in the periphery (outsiders). With their insider-leaning hybrid positionality, overseas Filipino scholars in the Global North accrue network-mediated benefits. They have respectable representation in publication count and are the most frequently cited authors. Positionality is examined as cultural capital accumulation and adoption of the dominant habitus that enable academics to shift positionality from outsider to insider and derive benefits in research and publishing. The article contributes to the literature on positionality-based inequalities in knowledge production and a periphery standpoint in the discourse on academic publishing inequality.

The development of high impact national and regional journals in medicine and the health sciences

The international academic journal publishing landscape is complex and in continuous flux. Many Russian editors and publishers wish to bring their journals into the global mainstream and to develop internationally competitive profiles for their work. Bibliometric citation systems are one means by which the quality of journals, of articles and researchers, can be assessed, referenced and compared. Scopus and the Web of Science are two major and respected quality assurance systems for global publishing, within which many academic journals seek formal listings. These listings help develop a wider international profi for any journal. They also provide valuable data through which journals can benchmark their performance against all other journals in any subject fi In turn, this information helps to stimulate competition and quality improvement across the entire academic journal ecosystem. Scopus provides a transparent and continually evolving evaluation and feedback system for journals seeking a listing and those journals that have already been listed within Scopus. An application for a Scopus listing is a process through which a journal is evaluated by several quantitative and qualitative criteria against global benchmarks. A successful listing can sometimes require a series of strategic insights and developments by editors and publishers over several years. In this article, Dr David Rew, a practising clinician and the Subject Chair for Medicine to the Scopus Content Selection Advisory Board since 2009, distils the experience of evaluation of more than 2000 Medical and Health Sciences journals to guide as to what features and strategies give academic journals a better chance of long term success in the competitive world of global academic publishing.