Pitching non-English language research: A dual-language application of the Pitching Research Framework

The global language of scholarly research is English and so the obstacle of getting noticed is montainous when the article is not written in the English language. Indeed, despite rapid advances in technology, the “tyranny of language” creates a segmentation inhibiting scholarly research and innovation generally. Mass translation of non-English language articles is neither feasible nor desirable. Our paper proposes a strategy for remedying this segmentation – such that, the work of non-English language scholars become more discoverable. The core piece of this strategy is a “reverse-engineering” [RE] application of Faff’s (2015, 2017a) “pitching research” template. More specifically, we provide access to translated versions of the “cued” template across thirty-three different languages, 1 Corresponding author: UQ Business School, University of Queensland, St Lucia. Qld. 4072. Australia. Email: r.faff@business.uq.edu.au; Telephone: +61 7 3346 8055 Fax: +61


Introduction
In this paper, we provide a multi-lingual "reverse-engineering" [RE] application of Faff's (2015Faff's ( , 2017aFaff's ( , 2017b) "pitching research" template to make (the core essence of) non-English language scholarly publications more discoverable by the global research community. i More specifically, we provide access to translated versions of the "cued" template across THIRTY-THREE different languages, namely: (1) Arabic; (2) 33) Turkish. Further, we showcase an illustrative dual language example of the RE strategy for the French-English case, and provide access to counterpart dual language examples involving Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese. These examples show how researchers can build a small, but effective, "bridge" from there mother toungue into English, thereby potentially opening up a pathway to being "discovered". We supplement these examples with reflective contributions from the exemplar pitchers, around the challenges, issues and value of this approach. In this exploratory way, we give a first view of a "soft" proof of concept that might encourage further extensions into some of the settings where the discoverability objective seems to be viably enhanced by our proposed "bridging" strategy.
Discoverability or visibility is a challenge that faces all researchers worldwidewith an ever increasing supply of good research entering the scholarly marketplace; this challenge is only becoming intensified. The global language of scholarly research is English and so the obstacle of getting noticed is magnified manyfold for an article that is not written in the English language. Indeed, despite rapid advances in technology, the "tyranny of language" creates a segmentation inhibiting scholarly research and innovation generally.
The following is an extract of an email recently received by the first author and it serves as one anecdotal indicator of the potential language barrier facing non-English language speakers: "Let me begin by thanking you for your simple template for pitching research. my name is ... I am a Ph.D. student in … University... I have studied your interesting article titled "a template for pitching research". Because my mother tongue is …, I am looking for a … equivalent for the word "pitching". But I do not understand the exact meaning of this word in your article. This term has several meanings in English and the word "pitch" in your article can be interpreted with different meanings. For example, pitch in English means to throw something with a lot of force, often aiming carefully. I can liken the research to a ball in baseball. Initially, the researcher (i.e. the pitcher) throws it for her/his selected person as a guider (i.e. the pitchee). This throw should be in the way that the person's attention be attracted to the research (i,e. pitchee can receive the ball). The way to do that is your pitch template. Another meaning for "pitch" is to set a speech, examination or explanation etc at a particular level of difficulty. I can imagine starting a research as a conversation between two people at the PhD level that should be done properly and interpreting your pattern as a tool for doing this conversation…" [anonymous extract from an email received on 13/2/2018] Ironically, this young scholar understood much more than she realisedas her insights into what the word "pitching" is meant to metaphorically convey are as close as one could possibly hope! Mass translation of non-English language articles is neither feasible nor desirable. But is there some meaningful middle ground? We say yes! Indeed, our paper proposes a strategy for remedying this segmentationsuch that non-English language scholars become more discoverable. ii Within our team, several members take on the responsibility of creating the dual-language paired examples of worked template pitches: a first version in the "mother tongue", with a counterpart translated into English.
There are three basic steps in the process.
Step 1 requires the pitcher to choose a relevant non-English language article that (ideally) should be recent, empirical and involve a research design which conforms to global industry norms relevant to the discipline in question. The academic journal should be: (a) one that publishes in the domestic (non-English) language onlythough it is acceptable if an English language ("free form") abstract is published by the journal and (b) widely viewed as a very high quality journal (by domestic scholars). Ideally, the authors of the selected article are high profile/ "guru" scholars (at least, as viewed by the domestic academic community). The topic of the chosen article is something of particular interest to and in the area of expertise of the pitcher.
Step 2 then requires the pitcher to reverse engineer the article into the format of Faff's (2015Faff's ( , 2017a pitching template. For example, in Step 2, a Chinese article is deconstructed into a Chinese language version of the template. This process will be broadly guided by the "parameters" enunciated by Faffnotably, including a Pitching non-English language research: A dual-language application of the Pitching Research Framework Vol. 17, No. 2 269 1,000-word limit, minimum of needless repetition and an eye for flow and "connectivity".
Step 3, then requires translating the domestic language template produced in Step 2, into an English language counterpart. The English language versions are polished, while maintaining reliable translation linkage with the original language version.
The current paper is organised as follows. iii, iv Section 2 offers information on all thirty-three translated versions of the "cued" version of the pitching template. Section 3 provides a brief account from one of our authorship team, a native Chinese scholar, of first floating the idea of a Chinese version of the template tool. Section 4 discusses the Chinese language version of the template. Section 5 discusses the Spanish language version of the template, with a set of reflections by a Spanish team leader. Section 6 discusses the Vietnamese language version of the template. Section 7 discusses the Japanese and French language versions of the template and presents a worked paired example for French-English. Section 8 concludes.  (2)  (33) Turkish. All of these are currently available from the online e-library and Table  1 provides the specific hyperlinks for accessing them directly. v Table 2 presents the Romanian language case as a highly relevant example for the core readership of this journal. It is also available in the e-library, appendix A178, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 1.  Table 3 provides the specific hyperlinks for accessing them directly.

"Sowing the seeds" -why not a Chinese language Pitching Research Template?
George Ye, one of the authorship team on the current paper, was a 2016 UQ Winter Research Scholar, exposed to many facets of the pitching research framework. vi In this context, he generated an idea of translating the original English pitching template into the Chinese language, so that the university students in China can benefit from using the pitching template to develop their graduate thesis. George says that he experienced unforgettable hardship on writing the graduate essay in the final year of his bachelor degree because students in China hardly have any research experience during the previous three years of their study, and thus have limited knowledge on how to write an academic paper. Therefore, George put forward in Faff et al. (2016b) a belief that there is huge potential demand from university students in China for using this pitching template as guidance for their graduate thesis.
However, an English language version is not applicable in this setting. One reason is that not many university students can fully understand the English template and the content that should be put into each of the sections. Another reason is that even if students could comprehend the English template, they still need to translate into Chinese when writing their own graduate essay. This is because the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China requires the bachelor's graduate essay to be written in Chinese, except for those who major in other languages. George argues that a Chinese language pitching research template would be well received, as long as it can be adjusted to fit the requirement of the Chinese graduate essay.
The above view was drawn at the conclusion of George's experience as a Winter scholar, at the end of 2016. As such, it represents an important seed for the current paper. Indeed, it stands as an inspirational beginning to what we hope will grow into a rich fruit-bearing tree, empowering novice researchers to deliver real and meaningful advances in the stock of scholarly knowledge, irrespective of their mother tongue.

Potential users of the pitching template in China
Jia (Angel) Chen, another member of our authorship team, was a 2017 UQ Summer Research Scholar. Jia, a Chinese national, was asked to continue developing the ideas of George Ye, as outlined in the previous sectionwith a specific focus on China. Jia stresses that currently, most Chinese scholars use their mother language, Chinese, to report their research. There are very few opportunities for them to write a research paper in English or present their ideas in English. There are three potential users of a Chinese-language version of the pitching research template: (a) undergraduate scholars; (b) postgraduate scholars and PhD students; (c) Chinese academic scholars.
Since most Chinese undergraduate scholars do not have much research experience, they are required to have the graduate thesis in the last year of university. The first step of their graduate thesis is an assessable paper called "thesis proposal", which is similar in spirit to Faff's (2015Faff's ( , 2017a pitching template. It seems that many Chinese universities do not provide a fixed format/template for the "thesis proposal", and so these students themselves might voluntarily choose to use the template design if they perceive it will help improve the quality of their proposal (and relatedly, improve their learning/understanding about research and ultimately their grades).
However, since China is well known for its complex procedures and proud traditions, it is easy to anticipate reasoning for not accepting the template. For example, they might think that the research outcomes would not be greatly affected because the "thesis proposal" is not viewed as being (directly) important, compared to the "graduate thesis" itself. Hence, it is critical to emphasize the value of generating clear and innovative ideas in graduates. Moreover, by arguing the strong link between these great ideas and higher quality graduate theses, (a) students would be more employable and (b) universities would enhance their academic reputation, thereby delivering expanded opportunities to connect and collaborate with overseas universities.
For Chinese postgraduate scholars, many supervisors require them to read mostly English literature. However, it is still common for postgraduate scholars to conduct research in Chinese. With Faff's (2015Faff's ( , 2017a template, they can learn how to understand a paper better. Moreover, for those postgraduates who would like to apply for a PhD program abroad, there could be a service develop to help them revise their proposals in the template format, to improve the quality, coherence and focus of their ideas. Compared with translation agents, such a service could be original and add significant value from a team of bilingual "professionals". This could easily reach a high level of efficiency, aided by the structured nature of the format.
For many Chinese academic scholars, while being very competent researchers, they are not adept at the English language. If a specialist team could help these Chinese scholars to distill their work into the template format and then translate into English, their signature research efforts could be known by many more scholars across the globe. Moreover, this enhanced "discoverability" could dramatically improve the chances of such Chinese scholars forming collaborations with international scholars. Conversely, a specialist team could potentially help translate English language templates of signature English based articles into a Chinese language version, catering for a potential market in China as well.

Chinese-English dual language paired examples
The cued version of the Chinese language pitching template is available in the elibrary, appendix A160, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 1. Angel, from our authorship team, created this version. Angel then followed a three phase approach to create a worked example for a dual-language pair of templates. Below is her personal account.

Phase 1: Seeking the target paper
My research interest is management accounting. Therefore I tried to search the top Chinese journal within this area online. And several journals popped up which are quite famous within the Chinese accounting academy. Through scanning the abstracts of different papers, I targeted one titled: "Internal control, inefficient investment, and enterprise value" at the top journal Friends of Accounting. It is one of the Chinese essential journals and the journal of the China commercial accounting institute. More importantly for me, the paper relates to internal control, which is the area I would like to conduct further research.
Phase 2: Reverse Engineered (RE) pitching in the Chinese language template I first translated each item in Faff's (2015Faff's ( , 2017a template into Chinese. I found it relatively easy to populate the content into each item because of my prior RE-pitch experience in the Summer Research Program at the University of Queensland. Nevertheless, I feel that every time I finish another RE-pitch template, I have a better understanding of the template itself and the paper that I read. It is not so much "practice makes perfect", but rather "practice makes better".

Phase 3: Translation into an English language version
During this process, I found it a bit challenging at first to translate some terms. Different languages have different writing styles, and I found it a little strange converting some terms/concepts into English. Based on my personal experience on these matters, I needed to "clear my mind" and so I tried reading some similar English literature first, forcing myself to revert back into the English language academic context. Having done this exercise for a while, armed with a greater familiarity of and confidence with the English related literature, I found the translation task much easier. Part of my strategy was to find similarities and differences between the writing style of the Chinese literature versus the English language counterparts. I would say it is definitely a good experience for me to have an appreciation of literature in my field, both in Chinese and English. Angel's Chinese-English language paired example is available in the e-library, appendix A232, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 3.
Another member of our authorship team, Clara, created a second Chinese worked example on "the game of fraudulent reporting". Her Chinese-English language paired example is available in the e-library, appendix A233, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 3. Also, Xuefeng, created a third Chinese worked example on "Strategic Management". His Chinese-English language paired example is available in the e-library, appendix A234, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 3.

Spanish language pitching template
Marisol Escobar, another member of our authorship team, was part of the 2016-17 UQ Summer Scholar Program. She believes that a Spanish language translated version of the pitching template could benefit Spanish-speaking university students during their research journey. This section considers the background scenarios of student researchers in Spanish speaking countries to determine the feasibility of this academic tool. There are 21 Spanish speaking countries across the world. vii Hence, exploring each background scenario that research students might face in every one of these countries would be burdensome and pointless. In view of this, we break down these scenarios into three main categories/target groups. Before continuing with the analysis, it's worth explaining some relevant Spanish academic terminology. When an undergraduate student completes all the requirements of their program they automatically obtain their bachelor's degree. However, there's a further step that students need to take to obtain their academic title. The main difference between both of these terms is that obtaining an academic title provides you the legal capacity to practice your profession. This means that if you obtain a bachelor's degree in Technical Industrial Engineering, for instance, for you to be able to legally sign projects, you would be required to have an academic title.
In some Spanish speaking countries, the only way to obtain the academic title is by developing a graduate thesis; however, in others, the student also has the option to produce a 'project report' or take a 'professional exam of sufficiency'. In either case, most universities don't have a 'structured program' (like honours for example) to engage students in research; it's something extra students are willing to do in order to obtain their title academic title.
Thus, the pitching template would help students to structure their research, efficiently assess the worthiness of their proposed project and pitch it to their supervisor. Furthermore, even though in some cases, there is no regulation that prevents graduates from Spanish university settings from writing their thesis in a language other than Spanish, it's very unlikely that they would follow this path since most feel far more comfortable writing such a piece of research in their native language. Hence, a Spanish translation of the original English template could benefit students in assisting them as a research planning tool. Considering this, the first category of potential users is undergraduate scholars who want to obtain an academic title by developing a graduate thesis. A second category are students who want to pursue postgraduate education (Masters/PhD) and they could use the translated pitch not only as a research planning tool but also as a research learning tool. Conducting different exercises with the pitch template would assist them in learning how to extract the core ideas from any piece of literature. Finally, is there merit in the idea of translating the Spanish version back to the original English language template? One could argue that there is only limited motivation for undergraduate or postgraduate scholars in Spanish speaking universities to complete the pitching template in English, since they've already developed their thesis in Spanish. However, Marisol believes that by having the opportunity to upload their English language pitch to the PitchMyResearch.com web portal and be selected as 'Pitch of the week', scholars might be motivated to invest some time in translating their pitch into English. Moreover, since the global language of research is English, this could also be a motivation for those scholars who want to make their research more widely 'known' or visible across the international academic community. This would be particularly the case for those students "eyeing off" (research) careers outside of the Spanish speaking world.
As a first step toward engaging with Spanish-speaking novice researchers, a Spanish language cued-version of Faff's (2015Faff's ( , 2017a pitching template is available in the e-library, appendix A161, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 1.

Vietnamese language template and paired worked example
The Vietnamese language translation of the cued template is available in the elibrary, appendix A176, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 1. Bao Nguyen is the member of our team charged with the responsibility of thinking about a Vietnamese language version of the pitching template. Bao followed a four-step process as follows, with the account below expressed in his words.
Step1: Choosing a Vietnamese academic paper in the field of my interest Regarding step 1, finding a high-quality Vietnamese empirical study in the "financial institution" field of research was not as simple as I had first thought. Because Vietnamese papers are rarely shown in the results of academic search engines (such as Google Scholar), it is not feasible to do key-word searching to identify the paper of interest. Alternatively, I decided to shortlist prestigious Vietnamese journals in the financial area. Across these journals, I scanned for papers which are recently published and written by Vietnamese "gurus" in the field of research.
In the process of choosing the paper, I also realized that most academic papers in Vietnamese prestigious journals already had their abstract or summary part written in English. This fact suggests that Vietnamese researchers are aware of the importance of making their research more discoverable. However, these abstract/summary pieces are usually not specific enough to convey the key ideas/findings of their research to English language speakers.
Step 2: Translating the Pitching Research Template into Vietnamese It is quite difficult to translate the title of each item of the template into Vietnamese, due to the fact that since they are carefully and extensively discussed in Faff (2015Faff ( , 2017a, their meanings are much more nuanced than what the printed words literally convey. Consequently, although I tried to choose Vietnamese words that have similar meaning to each item's title, some translated cases do not fit perfectly. Step 3: Creating a worked example in the Vietnamese language Although the paper is written by Vietnamese gurus and published in a Vietnamese prestigious journal, it still has some drawbacks which challenged me in the process of filling the template. For example, the authors mentioned Caglayan & Sak (2010) several times in their paper; therefore, I decided to choose it as one of three key papers. However, Caglayan & Sak (2010) does not appear in the paper's reference list, so I lacked information to populate the template and had to find the information from an alternative source. Step 4: Translating the Vietnamese language template example into English Finally, the Vietnamese language version was translated into English. Bao's worked example pitch is on "capital structure". This Vietnamese-English language paired example is available in the e-library, appendix A235, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 3.

Japanese case
The Japanese translation of the cued template is available in the e-library, appendix A162, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 1. Hideaki Sakawa created a paired bilingual worked example pitch on "Market Reaction to Management Forecasts and Actual Earnings Information". This Japanese-English language paired example is available in the e-library, appendix A236, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 3. Takahiro Nishi also created a paired bilingual worked example pitchthis one on determinants of life insurance demand in Japanese SMEs. This Japanese-English dual language paired example is available in the e-library, appendix A237, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 3. Table 4 shows the French translation of the cued template. Tables 5 and 6 provide Anne Jeny's paired bilingual worked example pitch on financial reportingin French and English, respectively. This French-English language paired example is also available in the e-library, appendix A238, accessible using the hyperlink shown in Table 3.

Conclusion
Discoverability or visibility is a challenge that faces all researchers worldwidewith ever increasing supply of good research entering the scholarly marketplace; this "discoverability" challenge is only becoming intensified. The global language of scholarly research is English and so the obstacle of getting noticed is magnified manyfold when the article is not written in the English language. Our paper proposes a strategy for remedying this segmentationsuch that non-English language scholars become more discoverable. The core piece of this strategy is a "reverse-engineering" [RE] application of the Faff's (2015, 2017a) "pitching research" template. More specifically, we provide access to translated versions of the "cued" template across THIRTY-THREE different languages. Further, we showcase an illustrative French-English dual language example. In this exploratory way, we give a first view of a "soft" proof of concept that might encourage further extensions into some of the settings where the discoverability objective seems to be viably enhanced by our proposed strategy.