Over a third of new conservation science documents published annually are in non-English languages, despite assumption of English as scientific ‘lingua franca’. Researchers find examples of important science missed at international level, and practitioners struggling to access new knowledge, as a result of language barriers.
>Language barriers continue to impede the global compilation and application of scientific knowledge >Scientific knowledge generated in the field by non-native English speakers is inevitably under-represented, particularly in the dominant English-language academic journals This potentially renders local and indigenous knowledge unavailable in English >The real problem of language barriers in science is that few people have tried to solve it. Native English speakers tend to assume that all the important information is available in English But this is not true, as we show in our study >Ignoring such non-English knowledge can cause biases in our understanding of study systems >A francophone researcher will always need more time than a native English speaker to produce a paper of equal scientific quality >Journals, funders, authors and institutions should be encouraged to supply translations of a summary of a scientific publication regardless of the language it is originally published in >While outreach activities have recently been advocated in science, it is rare for such activities to involve communication across language barriers >We should see this as an opportunity as well as a challenge. Overcoming language barriers can help us achieve less biased knowledge and enhance the application of science globally
In January 2004, when some dangerous virus of bird flu reappeared widely in the world, Chinese scientists found that one strain, H5N1, had infected pigs. It was an alarming finding because some experts argued that pigs had been a springboard for humans in the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more than 40 million people worldwide. But very few were aware of this disturbing discovery. It was in Chinese.
Scientists at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in northeast China published their findings that January in a Chinese-language Journal. Neither the World Health Organization nor the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations heard about the announcement until more than half a year later, Nature Journal later warned.
Mankind was in greater danger by language barriers
Aiden Jackson
Half of me wants to instill global language for science, as the SI units, and part of me also wants to have all scientific efforts focused on a globally cooperative space program
The other half of me knows the jews would take it over and fuck us like they mean it
Tyler Rogers
Wow, really good point. Journals should hire translators if they can.
Nicholas Butler
I feel like this is something our government should be funding. Like the department of education or something like that. At least put some of our tax money towards something that can actually get done at a consistent pace rather than funneling all the money into ambiguous administrative costs. But at the same time, if your paper doesn't have enough math/data in it for it to be universally understood, is it really that huge of a breakthrough?
Aiden Jones
>if your paper doesn't have enough math/data in it for it to be universally understood, is it really that huge of a breakthrough? Scratch that. This is a pretty big fuck up for humanity as a whole.
Angel Harris
But linguistics is a branch of philosophy.
Michael Gutierrez
Just learn English, you brainlets. Literally one of the easiest languages due to simple grammar and global cultural permeation.
The Japanese Ministry of the Environment has a biodiversity database with one million species records available only in Japanese env.go.jp/nature/biodic/ikilog/index.html
Joseph Foster
I would try to read these but I only speak french.
Mason Parker
Standardize on English and Americans will start using metric
Lol just write everything in Latin like we did 500 years ago
William Foster
>you I write all my stuff in English.
Jacob Bennett
>more papers in cuckweedish than /pol/ish
Gender Science papers don't count.
Jayden Rogers
>Researchers find examples of important science missed at international level, and practitioners struggling to access new knowledge, as a result of language barriers. Then stop being monolingual, stupid Americans.
Andrew Richardson
Came here to say this.
Andrew Nguyen
There are also two articles in the UNESCO published "World Social Science Report 2010" by Yves Gingras and Mosbah-Natanson and another one by Ulrich Ammon regarding the "unequal internationalization of English"
>Lol just write everything in Latin English. The standard language is English.
William Moore
English isn't really as spoken as a lot of people think, for example here is data from 2006 in European countries
Dylan Long
2012
>There are typos regarding Belgium, French is the mother tongue of 36% of the population not 38% and 52% can hold a conversation in English not 38%
Jaxon Thomas
United States, in 2001
Cameron Perry
...
William Lee
Mexico
Grayson Baker
Yeah this is absolutely ridiculous.
With all the bilinguists around these days journals should be legally obligated to have everything translated into English.
Kayden Kelly
>not being polylingual
Git guy brainlet
Dominic Walker
You can read 15 languages fluently? Wow user I sure wish I was a big brain like you.
Except the vast majority of researchers are only proficient in their native language and will only consult journals written in that language.
Jose Scott
>Except the vast majority of researchers vast majority of americans** FTFY
Jaxson Evans
From the article:
on the basis of valid and reasonably representative data, that even in applied linguistics (where it might be expected least of all) the predominance of a single language, English, in international scientific communication excludes contributions from various non-Anglophone quarters and, consequently, contributes to skewed scientific development, especially neglecting Japanese and Chinese, but also French, German, Italian and Russian approaches (because of serious linguistic barriers and refusal to participate in linguistically “unfair” scientific communication, respectively)
Luke Mitchell
So this would let us finally learn how chinese traditional medicine works?
Joseph Ward
>12.6 spanish >10.3 portugese Bitch we have enough Latinos in the Americas that could translate these scientific documents, I'd even volunteer desu.
But the rest, dunno but Italy would be kind of easy to translate as well and the rest would be hard as fuck.
Anthony Peterson
Communication is a bigger problem. It needs only one language to fail.
Bentley Hill
Well Chinese people could stop being cunts and teach English in schools.
Gavin Perez
If you can't publish in English, don't publish at all.
English is the official global language anyway.
Dylan Evans
>hurr hurr i knows different >literally think and say the samething but in different language
English or GTFO
Michael Fisher
>[CURRENT YEAR] >not publishing your shit in English A nice way to not start off your academic career desu.
Luke Bailey
If I remember correctly, natural language processing and translations are almost possible in real time through neural algorithms. Should it not then also be possible to automatically translate written text? As long as researchers don't use terribly prosaic language that defies grammatical conventions, this should be possible very soon.
Ayden Lee
You guys realize that according to the article "only" 64.4% of the research was in English in 2014, that is similar to the proportion of non-Hispanic Whites in the United States in 2014 (62.05%) Really makes you think isn't it?
Ian Sullivan
I'm surprised there's that much research published in Spanish. As a bilingual speaker I'm curious if there's work translating research to English.
James Murphy
FAT POOPY FART PENIIISS I FARTED ON A BAG OF POOP AND IT SMELLLSSS
Samuel Murphy
The technology is too messy and even if it were to be used it would probably only be used as a tool to help the translator because it would be super embarrassing to spread falsehoods over a mistranslation.
Brandon Scott
The regular non Hispanic isn't really making research papers
Robert Thomas
Ah I see. However, with time it becomes better and even if it is only an assistance to the translator, it can hardly hurt. And it could always learn from that particular paper.
Juan Ross
What a fucking dumb proposal
Hunter Mitchell
English grammar is literally of one the most illogical in the world. The exceptions sometimes surpass the rule. English itself is an intuitive language, if you weren't a monolingual pleb you'd realise this. If you want simple grammar, try the East Asian languages.
Ryan Gonzalez
He is right though. Conducting scholarship in living languages was a mistake. English language writings as recent as those from the 19th century are barely understandable to modern readers due to the archaic language, and even earlier scholarship is generally only known in various adapted/abridged versions. Living languages will continue to evolve and perpetuate these problems.
The advantage of Latin was not that it was "the standard" (that's arbitrary), but precisely the fact that it was a dead language. Using a living language you are stuck in a temporal bubble one or two centuries wide in which the works of others are understandable. Beyond that bubble you might as well learn a new language.
Meanwhile if you learn Latin you can understand works written over the span of two millennia with far less trouble than a modern English speaker trying to understand his own native language from a few centuries ago.
The current linguistic barriers the thread focuses on may not be as painful in the long run as the temporal barriers we are continuously erecting - an incomprehensible bulwark against future generations of scholars.
Jackson Bailey
The fundamental truths survive though. Math, Logic are still around. Only the social sciences suffer from this time bubble and they should, as they are far more influenced by 200 years of change than language is
Sebastian Gomez
As long as people are working with it, a language isn't dead. Medieval Latin diverged significantly from any previous form of the language.
Furthermore, no fixed language would be adequate for rapidly advancing fields. The language has to evolve to be useful for efficiently expressing concepts. Imagine trying to talk about computer programming in Latin! You'd have to reinvent dictionaries worth of vocabulary, and it would still be gibberish to anyone trained on the classics.
Nathan Wilson
>Portugese that far ahead of Mandarin ???
Juan Hall
Brazil
Christian Ortiz
>forcing people to write in a language they don't understand
Sure, the vast majority of people nowadays can speak and write english properly, but that's not everyone. And I'd rather have work done in a non-english language than reading a grammatically error-riden paper/dataset/whatever because the person conducting it worced themselves to do so.
Also, nothing is more enjoyable than pissing of brainlets who can only speak one language.
Brody King
We need one global language for communication to work to have peace on earth. Only one! I choose English because it's the most intelligent one: for a small number of the most intelligent people on earth who can write in grammatically-correct, complete sentences; with actual punctuation and capitals).
Cameron Gomez
To be fair, lingua francae are clearly useful. It used to be Latin but nobody speaks that so English was the next best thing. Whatever language it is, it's gonna be easier to communicate if everyone's speaking the same one.
If it ain't broke...
Isaiah Flores
Who the fuck decided to make English the global language? I mad.
BRING BACK LATIN!!1
Justin Williams
What the hell do smelly third-worlders know that we don't
Brandon King
Humbleness.
Chase Gomez
Is that all? Thanks for shining the light on the mystery. Now we've got all the knowledge they have to offer
Ayden Butler
Use Finnish instead. Anybody able to learn that is smart enough for science.
Camden Jackson
Portispeak is because Brazil's government is fucking retarded and many of their grants require them so publish in seanigger speak.
Spanish is due to illiteracy in those countries and Chinese is due to peer review dodge attempts.
Jack Cook
>English language writings as recent as those from the 19th century are barely understandable to modern readers due to the archaic language Bullshit.
Wyatt White
Also the French are just pricks.
Basically the 3.0% on the right hand side is the most important non-English though.
Nicholas Kelly
just hire all those linguistics/languages + [science domain] degree graduates to translate them
some deep and abstract concepts might only best expressed on someone's native tongue
Michael Anderson
>And I'd rather have work done in a non-english language than reading a grammatically error-riden paper/dataset/whatever because the person conducting it worced themselves to do so You're reading from a shitty journal then. If the refs allow a paper containing that many errors then perhaps you should really question the integrity of its editors.
Samuel James
tfw
Jaxon Mitchell
The database used was Google Scholar
Jaxson Baker
>Lol just write everything in Latin like we did 500 years ago
This is a bad idea.
We use latin language for some stuff because its a dead language, if we started to really use latin to talk with others this would fuck with all other curent uses of latin
Josiah Rivera
>What the hell do smelly third-worlders know that we don't Our language
Nicholas Sanchez
Trying to imagine how a language would be if it was 'created' like math
Camden Campbell
>Jews on the moon
KHHAAAAANNN!!
Adam Hughes
The problem are scientists who don't give a shit about English publishing things English-speaking scientists want to know
Jeremiah Mitchell
>English language writings as recent as those from the 19th century are barely understandable to modern readers
>Charles Dickens >barely understandable
>Adam Smith >barely understandable
even Shakespeare is understandable, whose writing are a bit older than XIXth century, even though it's poetry.
Easton Howard
>implying any research that's not in English is even worth reading
Tyler Foster
You mean Esperanto?
Joshua Martinez
>even Shakespeare is understandable, Not to me it's not. Seriously what the fuck are these people on about in his plays?
Connor Ward
Polysemy in English language is terrible as hell, it's too barrier to global science, also USA like buy "brains" and do headhunting, so English speaking scientists can be easy stealted from an original country.
Nathaniel Bennett
checked
Dylan Lewis
You're right. There's only one truly universal storyteller.
Benjamin Scott
>t. Guatemalan
Carter Long
I dunno but I just remember not understanding a word they were saying. Apart from the odd bit.
I felt I understood R&J a bit better after watching the Zeferelli film in school but still that was mostly from the action, the dialogue eluded me.