ver 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
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
Gavin Ramirez
>Native English speakers tend to assume that all the important information is available in English Because it is.
Jacob Torres
>not writing all your papers in Latin baka
Charles King
fuck off gloablist shill. how about learning other languages instead? every great physicist etc. could speak like 3 or more languages in the past so why is this a problem now?
Owen Lopez
I'm forced to write my thesis in my language, even when ALL the materials are in English, all my work has been done in a primarily English-speaking enviroment (cooperating with colleagues from all around the world) and most of the terms used are in English and are problematic to translate. The most bogus thing? Editing all the images, as there can only be text in my language.
What that means is that basically, all the theses written in my country are forced to remain obscure, unimportant and without merit.
Landon Ward
If you don't speak English you belong in the trash.
English is the only language that matters and that is an ideology I wouldn't mind having a third World War in order to establish. Fucking foreigners are actually retarded so nice bait OP, but their logic gates are broken because of the structure of the language they think in going as far as affecting math.
Anthony Taylor
>language they think in going as far as affecting math. Fantastic English, my dude. Go fuck yourself.
Jason Myers
>When user tries and defending those literature in the English language, whilst being thoroughly illiterate throughout his discourse. Egads, how droll!
Michael Ross
Why are China and Taiwan separate languages?
Dominic Allen
>t. ESL foreigners
Liam Fisher
Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese
Isaiah Brown
Why is China classified as one language? There are a bunch of fairly dominant languages in China, alone.
Jacob Baker
They just used flags for convinience
Colton Wright
Then why are Spanish and Portuguese not broken to Mexico, Brazil, Chile etc.?
Ryder Richardson
same script and written language only the spoken languages are different
Dylan Harris
Oh, I didn't know that. Thank you, user.
Mason Brown
see
Justin Ross
I wanted to say scientific work is strictly Mandarin, but then remembered Hong Kong
Robert Nguyen
Why isn't English broken into the various flags of the Anglosphere?
Jackson Rodriguez
How common is Portuguese in Macau?
Jaxon Parker
No, the PRC flag stands for Simplified Chinese (spoken language: Mandarin Chinese) and the RC (Chinese Taipei) flag stands for Traditional Chinese (spoken language: Mandarin Chinese) Again, they used flags for convinience.
Luke Rivera
I was talking about language differences, not countries of origin. Some f English works come from non-anglosphere countries like Israel or Sweden
Jaxon Collins
Got it.
Kevin Anderson
Portuguese is not really spoken by a lot of people in Macau, but it's one of the official written languages together with Mandarin Chinese in Traditional Characters and also one of the official spoken languages in Macau together with Cantonese Chinese and Mandarin Chinese. All goverment street signs have to be at least in Portuguese and Traditional Chinese, Portuguese is also used by the goverment, in education, etc., it's even on thei passports
Juan Wilson
Very interesting, I've always thought about visiting and wondered how integral it was to learn.
Jeremiah Young
Are you implying I'm ESL? With better English than a native speaker?
Don't post fecal matter like this. The posts explain that not all of it.
Gabriel Ortiz
/thread Latin is the only acceptable scientific lingua franca
Julian Carter
This is why we need to put more effort into machine learning based robust language translation
I idealize a text database where users can contribute content in any language they want, and users can already read any content in any language they want
Text could be transformed into a robust but human-incomprehensible intermediate form, understood only by the translation algorithms, which can then be translated into any language the user wants
User submits a post in French => post translated from French into intermediate language
User requests to read that post in Arabic => post translated from intermediate language into Arabic
User requests to read that post in English => post translated from intermediate language into English
We will get here soon and it will be revolutionary
Alexander Brooks
Surely that's biased. Surely if you searched "食べる" it would yield the obvious different results. Surely.
Michael Butler
Surely, the people of Veeky Forums can't be so retarded as to believe that there aren't merits of a different logical structure to how ideas are put together?
Surely, these good men and manchildren realize that language is subject to a similar selection process to the selective process of biological evolution, and that English is the way it is not because it is inherently the best, but because its structure is stable enough to convey ideas without the necessity arising for it to change dramatically (which, even then, it has changed quite a bit in even the past hundred years as new advances are made).
Surely, while there can be arguments for some languages over others in easy to use/understand logical formatting, the blanket dismissal of all is merely a joke, and not some ill-educated attempt at putting one's self on a pedestal for egotistic reasons?
Nicholas Walker
>Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese >conservation research I doubt that.
Kevin Russell
of course you do
Easton Powell
>withdrew from latin cause I'm too much of a brainlet to speak using words instead of memes and pictures
