published online on January 18, 2016, followed by the hard copy ... On August 9, 2017, the editorial office of Studia Neophilologica sent us a Letter to the Editor.
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of a letter published in Studia Neophilologica: Stamenković, Dušan, Miloš Tasić
&
Vladan
Pavlović
(2018).
“Letter
to
the
Editor
revisited”.
Studia
Neophilologica,
DOI:
10.1080/00393274.2018.1474135, 1651-2308 (Online) [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2018.1474135.
Letter to the Editor revisited
Dear Readers and the Editorial Board,
Please let us express our deepest concern regarding what took place after our paper titled “Prototype Theory and Translation Equivalent Selection: The Case of Motion Verbs” was published online on January 18, 2016, followed by the hard copy included in the 89th volume of Studia Neophilologica (Stamenković, Tasić & Pavlović 2017a).
On August 9, 2017, the editorial office of Studia Neophilologica sent us a Letter to the Editor submitted by Bacem A. Essam and Fadia Ahmed A. M. Badawi (Ain Shams University) that criticized several aspects of our study. As we believed that structured and well-argued discussions are and should be a legitimate way of expressing disagreement and stating different positions on different topics, we decided to accept the editorial team’s proposal and provide a response to the letter in question. Given the letter sent to us on August 9, 2017, we structured a response (Stamenković, Tasić & Pavlović 2017b) and sent it to the editorial office on August 29, 2017.
On October 8, we received what we thought were the final versions of the Letter to the Editor and the Response. Both letters contained several editorial changes, and were absolutely acceptable – they in fact seemed like a decent and properly structured discussion between two groups of people who did not agree on several theoretical and practical aspects.
When we opened and read the version of the Letter to the Editor (Essam and Badawi 2017) published online, we realized that this was not the version of the letter we had responded to. It became obvious that Essam and Badawi had added new material to their letter after seeing our response (we suppose that they also received the two final versions for verification before the production process started). We then decided to contact the editorial office of Studia
Neophilologica, who clarified that they had not allowed any of these changes, which meant that the changes happened during the production process and without the editors’ knowledge. We were not given a chance to see, let alone respond to any of these additional comments. Such additions have illicit power to make some of the responses to the original comments sound odd and definitely less powerful, as was the case with the letter we believed we had responded to (only to later find out that it was somehow changed after our response).
The additional comments were added to the first, fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth paragraph of the original letter, and most of them were clearly responses to our responses (again, given in a modified version of the letter we had already responded to). Here are a few examples: the additional comments in the first paragraph account for our argument of timeliness, the comments in the sixth paragraph clearly refer to our discussion of possible theoretical frameworks, while the new comments in the eighth paragraph attempt to neutralize our explanation of the participants’ background. At one point, in the sixth paragraph, there is even a comment in which our paper is called “Stamenković’s study”, which is not something the editors would have allowed. At another point, the authors go ad hominem and accuse us of promoting confusion. In the fifth paragraph, they introduce a number of features completely new to this discussion, meaning that they were not present in their original letter to the editor (animacy, telicity, agency, path, force dynamics and directionality of motion verbs).
We sincerely believe that authors should not display such behaviour in any form of written discussion, formal or informal, and especially in academic and other professional correspondence. Let us compare this to a game of chess – once you make a move, and this move is followed by a move made by the player sitting on the other side of the board, you cannot be allowed to go back and change your move after you have seen his or her response to your original move. Given the set of events we have explained, we think that what happened here is not in line with good academic practice nor with the basic principles of fair play.
Once again, we express our concern with the issue at hand and genuinely regret that it had to come to this, particularly bearing in mind that we were prepared to engage in a constructive discussion on the points raised by Essam and Badawi in their original letter to the editor. Given the ensuing
turn of events, we were forced to voice our dissatisfaction with the outcome of the whole process. Finally, we would like to thank the editorial board for their efforts towards resolving this issue.
Sincerely, Dušan Stamenković, Miloš Tasić and Vladan Pavlović University of Niš
References
Essam, Bacem A. & Fadia Ahmed A. M. Badawi. 2017. Letter to the editor. Studia Neophilologica, DOI: 10.1080/00393274.2017.1391052. Stamenković, Dušan, Miloš Tasić & Vladan Pavlović. 2017a. Prototype theory and translation equivalent selection: The case of motion verbs. Studia Neophilologica 89:1, 81–94, DOI: 10.1080/00393274.2015.1132179. Stamenković, Dušan, Miloš Tasić & Vladan Pavlović. 2017b. Response. Studia Neophilologica, DOI: 10.1080/00393274.2017.1391053.
