This thesis describes how intellectual boundary spanning can be identified in the written ideas of millions of scholars, and finds that such efforts encounter translational problems which can hinder faculty careers. In particular, the work presented develops textual metrics of intellectual boundary spanning (interdisciplinarity) and field coherence (paradigmaticness) and then applies those constructs as predictors of successful scientific careers (tenure). Prior work has primarily looked at actor attributes and coarse notions of collaboration and citation networks to predict career success, but the work here develops a means to "go deep" and capture how much actors bridge ideational domains and the boundary salience these intellectual domains have. The first chapter takes millions of documents from the Web of Science and develops a metric for intellectual interdisciplinarity and compares it to other metrics of interdisciplinarity. The contribution is to measure how broad (distal) a scholar's ideas reach, or how far their language spans different fields. This has never been done before, as prior work relies mainly on categorical attributions of interdisciplinarity when authors span subject categories or their collaborations extend across them. The second chapter recognizes that the coherence of intellectual fields differ, where some are more paradigmatic and coherent than others. The concept of paradigmaticness is of central relevance to the sociology of science (e.g., Kuhn, Toulmin, Collins). The analyses in this chapter operationalize the concept as a generalizable measure applicable to millions of research documents. In so doing, one can quantitatively describe how fields differ in their linguistic coherence so that some have core vocabularies that tun over (pre-paradigmatic) and others have stable core vocabularies that rapidly change at the periphery (rapid-discover paradigms). In the final chapter, these important metrics are used as predictors of career outcomes. In particular analyses test whether tenure is a function of the intellectual context faculty find themselves in (how paradigmatic it is) or how much they perform intellectual bridging (interdisciplinarity). Using data on thousands of Stanford faculty members from 1993-2008, competing risk hazard models find that there is an interdisciplinary penalty for tenure, and that this penalty is greater for more defined and paradigmatic fields than less paradigmatic ones (e.g., STEM > non-STEM). This is a textual and intellectual story, not a relational or collaboration one as presented in prior work. As such, the findings show that spanning intellectual domains creates translation issues that grow more problematic as a field's intellectual boundary is more strongly defined. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]