TDE - Translingual Discourse in Ethnomusicology

Translingual Discourse in Ethnomusicology (TDE) is a peer-reviewed scholarly ejournal aiming at encouraging discourse across language barriers by publishing English translations of ethnomusicological papers that have originally appeared in other languages and therefore probably not received their due recognition. Papers are selected from proposals made by our Editorial Board of international advisors and are usually compiled according to common themes and issues. During the 20th century ethnomusicology has developed into a world-wide scholarly endeavor. While this has resulted in publications in a large range of languages, all leading ethnomusicological journals are published in English today. Although a researcher focusing on a particular culture will usually be able to read publications in the relevant language(s), many issues including general methodological and theoretical considerations profit considerably from a cross-cultural perspective. Because obviously nobody will be able to read papers in all those languages, English has become the lingua franca for international ethnomusicological exchange. On the other hand, a lot of papers which would be relevant both to current ethnomusicological discourse as well as to a reconstruction of earlier or regional approaches and of paradigmatic shifts over time are practically excluded from a general debate because they have not been published in English and are therefore only accessible to area specialists. Such older contributions need to be contextualized, however, and this will be achieved by compiling re-published articles according to common themes and by looking at the issues involved from a contemporary perspective. While papers to be re-published will be proposed by the members of a board of advisors consisting of internationally renowned ethnomusicologists, one for each language involved, additional original contributions will by invited in order to assure an integration of the earlier papers into current discourse. The format of an e-journal in combination with a digital archiving system will enable authors to add audio and video examples to their texts. In the case of journals this option has been available only rarely, thus limiting the possibility of checking the argument of the text against the research data. The re-published papers will not be re- written but only translated. However, an introductory paragraph may be added by the author and the version in the original language will be added as a supplement. We consider both the way in which we will overcome language barriers in scholarly discourse as well as the introduction of original research data as part of journal papers as innovations that might attract attention from other humanities and/or social sciences.