Academic Writing in Portugal

In the increasingly globalised world of academic production, Portuguese researchers are under intense pressure to publish in English, generating a huge demand for translation, revision and specialised language services. However, there are considerable rhetorical and epistemological differences between the hegemonic discourse of Anglophone academia and the traditional Portuguese writing style of the humanities, which can cause serious problems not only for translators but also for Portuguese academics that wish to write their papers directly in English. This work explores those differences across a range of academic disciplines and genres by means of three complementary studies: a Corpus Analysis of over 400 Portuguese academic texts; a survey of Portuguese researchers in the humanities and social sciences; and a review of Portuguese academic style manuals. The results are of great practical interest to all those attempting to teach, write or translate English academic discourse in the Portuguese context, as well as to anyone concerned with the controversial issue of linguistic imperialism.