Researchers discuss the challenges posed by science’s embrace of English
nature.com
nature.com
> I’ve worked on many multinational collaborations, and I notice that European researchers often speak to each other in their native languages. However, it’s relatively uncommon to see Chinese or South Korean scientists talking to each other in their own language in an academic setting away from their home country. They just don’t feel comfortable.
In my experience, Chinese are one of the most likely to form little cliques with their compatriots when abroad (and speak their own language while at it). They're not the only ones to do so, but they definitely seem to do it more than average.
Private gathering during professional conference? Yes.
I said something about them switching languages on me and they said, "No we didn't." And apparently they were still speaking English but when conversing more directly with each other that in the group their accent went so thick and fast it honestly sounded like a foreign language to my uneducated ear. They were totally unaware of this and were really surprised when I said I couldn't understand what they were saying anymore. Made for ongoing jokes for a month or two.
I've worked with multiple groups of foreign nationals at multiple jobs, and no discernable pattern related to ethnicity emerged. Sometimes one group would talk in their native tongue, sometimes not. It turns out that stereotype isn't a reliable metric.
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143
The rise of English as the lingua franca of science certainly would lead to less translations being produced, but I don't think it should reduce to near zero as it seems to have. Today there's still valuable research that's not published in English.
During my PhD I published several translations (all produced via Google Translate and manual editing) and consistently people thought this was some weird quirk of mine. But I enjoyed it and learned quite a few things I would not have known otherwise.
Really? I don't think there was ever much translation.
Before WWII, a LOT of science was in German (arguably more of a scientific lingua franca than English at the time), and it seems like conferences (ie. face-to-face communication) were the primary way that scientific advances crossed languages.
Look at my Stack Exchange post. I know from the "Consolidated Index of Translations into English" that there were ad-hoc English translations of very roughly 300,000 articles produced from 1953 to 1986 (that were reported to the index). That's ignoring the cover-to-cover translation journals too. This isn't everything, but it's a lot. In my experience the ad-hoc translations tended to pick the most important articles that the cover-to-cover translation journals missed.
It appears that there was never any drive for translation from the scientific side.
The index I mentioned was produced by the Special Libraries Association, which is an organization that still exists today and has no link to US intelligence as far as I'm aware. The CIA has their own public translations index circa the 1960s (with a similar name) but that largely duplicates this one, and as far as I'm aware rarely mentions actual CIA translations.
The most common type of translation listed is the TT series. The TT series had nothing to do with intelligence agencies as far as I'm aware. Looks like it was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Special Libraries Association: https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trstt.html
The UK translations series I've seen were entirely motivated by scientific interest. In fact, I recall that while looking through a UK translations index I found a form to request a translation. Seems to have been addressed to scientists as intelligence agencies presumably would have the resources to translate articles in-house.
Also, the large number of cover-to-cover translation journals, many of which continue today, would suggest there is appreciable scientific interest in translations.
I'm always baffled with how disjointed and chaotic the global science community seems. Why there isn't something like Facebook for science? Are there grants for solving meta problems like this?
One interesting fact about using a foreign language: There is a research saying that lying in a foreign language is easier. English is not my mother tongue so don't take this for granted :D
I totally agree. I guess since you have to use more those areas involved in language and rational thinking, I find much more easy to say emotional content in a foreign language. You feel more detached of what you are saying.
Tldr: It's easier to say "I love you" or "I hate you" in a foreign language.
I hope not, why would there even be something as dreadful. Interdisciplinary research and science communication are great things and yes there are those who pursue PhDs in that but it's very difficult career wise.
One huge problem is the amount of jargon each and every field accumulates, there are also a too many gibberish meta research papers written and published, they're using the right scientific words and packed with clever explanations but are mostly utterly worthless. And the worthlessness doesn't end there, splitting one subject and it's findings into different articles is just one of those anti-patterns made to show the number of papers to receive more grants.
Of all the problems Science faces the language used is the least of our problems. Little things like funding, insecure tenure, and the immense publish or perish pressure are what we need to be looking at.
... are you sure we speak the same language?
This makes it difficult to form a unified theory of the language. The more elegant your rules, the more exceptions there are.
But it’s also a super power. It makes the language feel more familiar to just about anyone who speaks an Indo-European language. There’s something homely and welcoming in english for anyone.
And the readiness with which english adopts foreign vocabulary when practical is simply inspiring. You can introduce basically any word from any language and make it stick.
And then there’s Slavic languages where at least in mine, every verb or pronoun can come in one of 20 or so different forms. Nouns have 20+ different forms too.
Not expecting Slovenian to become lingua franca of anything any time soon. It’s just too hard.
The written form is painful though.
The one major thing English has going for it is that native English speakers are pretty tolerant of non-native speakers getting the grammar wrong. With just a little effort you can get people to understand you which is not the case for many languages.
To elaborate, and mis-quote a general, He wins who gets there fastest with the mostest.
Imagine if China had developed digital computers first and had to map their writing to n-ary. It would not be extensions of ASCII upon which we still rely. Imagine instead an algebra of notation based on composition of analogies. Which is why English is not entirely unusual as a Lingua Franca.
English is easy to learn, incorporates a smorgasbord of techniques from other languages, has a rich literature (there has to be more than one good reason to learn a language) and so has ample comparatives. It uses an alphabet, has a lot of law, and is subject to no central authority.
English is a committee of language camels trekking through our desert of ignorance. Kinda like C++
Flame on!
Bioinformatics has BioStars, stack exchange, and bioarvix.
The traditional way is to organize meetups in the way of conferences, workshops, symposia, etc. It has a number of issues since some labs can't afford sending students or postdocs overseas and some countries are disadvantaged (for geographic or visa restriction reasons) but the organizers are usually well-aware of it and e.g. give out grants to cover expenses for students who apply for it.
I think the onus is on English speakers to reach out for the hidden knowledge out there, and not for the majority of the community to adapt to the native English-speaking minority. Right now they don't feel challenged because Anglo-Saxon univeristies are pretty much 'where it's at' and European ones more or less follow suit, but with the rise of Chinese research the situation may be about to change.
-It has loads and loads of words, many of them overlapping with subtle differences that go over the head of many non-native speakers yet still carry some kind of difference between intended and perceived meaning. Some of them are just synonymous, such as Latin/Germanic cognate couples (godly vs. divine, tiredness vs. fatigue, etc.), and you just sort of have to learn them all if you want to understand everything you read or hear. So you apply yourself and it turns out that you're still not understood because the vast majority of the community doesn't speak English as a first language either and also has trouble understanding one or the other form you're using.
-Its pronunciation and spelling is completely wild and inconsistent. You can't guess how to pronounce a word you first encounter. And in scientific and technical presentations there are a lot of such words! This doesn't even take into account the various accents within native English speakers (I'm somehow supposed to be able to understand both the Californian and Australian accents no matter how nerve-rattling they sound) and non-native speakers (who also have the same trouble pronouncing new words as I do, except they'll mis-pronounce it differently than I would).
-The way sentence structure is designed favors the apposition of many different words without any preposition, leading to ambiguities. This is of course exacerbated in papers with absurd word count constraints that must somehow fill the needs of print journals despite the fact that 99% of people read them online. It also makes for very terse, opaque and generally tedious reading. The only thing more annoying than reading a paper is writing one, because you're also going to have to write in the same opaque style in order to squeeze as much information as you can in order to fit your 3 year project's worth of discoveries into a 1500 word Nature letter.
-It's unfair that non-native speakers be discriminated on peer-review based on the quality of their English. Reviewers and editors like to pretend they're unbiased but they're not. The quality of the work is independent on the author's ability to write in a foreign language. I'll readily admit that judging someone based on their mastery of a language is not unique to English speakers but this particular situation is especially egregious since most native English speakers do not, in fact, speak any foreign language.
-It's generally a constant reminder of the cultural hegemony held by the US and Anglo-Saxon countries in general. Native speakers are advantaged since they have to learn less and are still less discriminated; scientists flock to Anglo-Saxon universities despite other ones being as competent if not more, but less well-known; the top journals such as Nature or Science are either British or American, reinforcing this bias. Univerisities ratings are often based on publications in these Anglo-Saxon journals, further deepening the bias. And lastly, Anglo-Saxons in general (and Americans in particular) have a very strong Not Invented Here syndrome whereby anything that was discovered outside the anglosphere is disregarded or met with much more skepticism than usual. Every so often an American paper comes out touting a new innovative "amazing" method that will completely revolutionize a field despite the principles having been discovered years before but outside the land of the free. It's frankly annoying.
This would be particularly advantageous in Europe, where the population of many smaller countries with their own language is falling. It would also attract inter-EU migrants.
It seems it would only make communicating ideas harder.
Culture? At what expense?
> English speakers have become the gatekeepers of science. By keeping those gates closed, we’re missing out on a lot of perspectives and a lot of good research.
OK, so let's say we switch to having everyone publish in their own native language because gosh we wouldn't want to be gatekeepers. Now instead of one 'gate', we have... hundreds, because everyone has to learn every language or else they are being 'gatekept'. Oops.
This pervasive error, this nirvana fallacy, of praising only the benefits of multi-lingualism, renders the entire discussion moot. It's a tissue of complaints and buzzwords.
The idea that every piece of discourse should be in English is a modern phenomenon. It ironically has arrived just as the automated translation renders the interlinguistic literature gap irrelevant.
People should be talking about forcing English speakers to work in their non native language, not just about the woes of a single common language for science.
It is precisely at this moment that we have the ability to gain from cultural diversity without losing intelligibility. Will we go for this possibly? Probably not....
There are thousands of languages in use worldwide. If English weren't the modern lingua franca, what would stop people from having these same complaints about any other "universal" language?
> It ironically has arrived just as the automated translation renders the interlinguistic literature gap irrelevant.
>It is precisely at this moment that we have the ability to gain from cultural diversity without losing intelligibility
Modern translators have come a long way, but they're far from able to translate scientific texts into intelligible English, especially without losing meaning, particularly from languages which have vastly different grammatical and conceptual styles, like Chinese, for example.
I think it's just en Vogue right now to complain about the Anglo-Saxon hegemony; these problems are not caused by English per se, and the rate of progress is substantially better with this current standard than the alternative you propose of keeping international research effectively siloed by language.