Purdue Online Writing Lab College of Liberal Arts
Using Foreign Languages in Academic Writing in English
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This resource provides information on strategies that the students can use when incorporating languages other than English in their academic texts.
When writing a research paper, you might want to use a non-English language source to present original data that is not available in English. This data might take various forms: some of it might be literary work (lines of poetry or prose), original archival documents (such as a decrees, bills, chronicles, etc.), research articles that were written in a language you know, or any other information which is crucial for your project but does not yet exist in English.
This resource will provide you with discussion of general considerations for translation in academic writing as well as information on the MLA conventions of integrating foreign languages in academic texts. The specific issues include:
- General translation strategies
- Quoting foreign text and translating quotations
- Using foreign names and titles in English writing
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