ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at translation in academia from a political philosopher's perspective and norms and institutions related to translation. The "publish or perish" culture that emerged in academia, combined with the bibliometric tools used to quantify the relative impact of researchers, made it clear that individual interest was maximized by publishing in English. The chapter argues that the perverse incentives researchers have encourage the production of negative externalities that reduce the value of two collective goods absolutely central to their scientific activity and to the production of knowledge: English as a scientific lingua franca and their local scientific languages. Languages, like any other tool of communication, are subject to a particularly interesting type of market failure: network externalities. Because of externalities, freely pursuing the individual projects, and this includes of course freely choosing the language best suited to maximize the utility, leads to linguistic free riding.
