Korean Scholars’ Use of For-Pay Editors and Perceptions of Ethicality

Abstract

Many Korean scholars rely on language professionals for preparing English manuscripts. So far, little has been reported on how Korean scholars utilize them and how they perceive various types of help received. This study examines how Korean scholars utilize for-pay editors and translators, and how they perceive various types of textual modifications incurred in the process, based on the data obtained through a survey completed by 88 Korean faculty from three universities. Half of the participants received proofreading help from for-pay editors, and fewer participants received help with translation. They held widely differing views on ethicality concerning scenarios that involved global- and content-level editing; none of the help described was perceived as clearly unethical. This paper argues that as the academic communities benefit from the knowledge and insights created through research conducted by scholars across the world, it is necessary to establish proper boundaries of writing help.

Keywords

• academic integrity
• multilingual scholars
• language editors
• English as a lingua franca
• academic ethics