The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
nature.com
nature.com
But it is true that there is cost to non-English speakers. Maybe we can lower the standard a little bit? I don't mean broken Engrish but if the sentences make sense and the grammar is correct, maybe that is good enough?
The writing system on the other hand... IMO the worst used by any major language in the world. Graft a logographic system (already a bad choice to start) from an isolating language onto a highly synthetic verb system, necessitating a whole extra syllabary. Evolve numerous "readings" of each logogram, depending on etymology and history. Then tack on a 2nd syllabary for abstruse historical reasons.
We can't demand things like that. If a paper reads like amateur English, reviewers are pretty much guaranteed to turn it down with higher probability, even if the factual quality is somewhat better than of a well-written paper. This is just how the mind works. Like wine from a cheap looking bottle tasting worse than the same wine from an expensive looking bottle.
Not true. The period of greatest scientific advancement in human history ( mid-19th to the mid-20th century ) had no lingua franca. Actually, the end of french as a 'lingua franca' in europe in the first half of 1800s can partly be credited with the burgeoning of science ( and other academic fields ) in britain, germany, russia, etc. Just like the ending of latin as 'lingua franca' ( beginning of the 'vulgar' period ) led to the burgeoning of religion, philosophy, literature, etc throughout europe.
> Maybe we can lower the standard a little bit? I don't mean broken Engrish but if the sentences make sense and the grammar is correct, maybe that is good enough?
Or maybe people should speak their own language and 'do science' in their own language.
What's more preferable? Having one billion chinese learn english to study algebra with an english language textbook or translated that one algebra textbook into chinese and have one billion chinese learn algebra in chinese?
The dull and boring mono-linguistic and mono-culture world has led to stagnation. The world would be infinitely better off when that changes. When we have actual diversity, not the superficial diversity where we look different but all think and talk the same.
Look at the tech world today. Look at just europe alone. How great would it be if europe had a german, spanish, russian, french 'google/apple/microsoft/etc'? Now broaden that view to the arab, persian, chinese, indian, african, etc regions. So much diversity, knowledge, creativity, etc is lost because one group of people want to dominate the world. It's tragic.
Huh?!? That's totally false.
The lingua franca changed from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Depending on the field of science it was either French or German and transitioned to English.
For physics it was German moving into English over that 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications...
In math French was a bit more of a player. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_important_publications... Hilbert for example published in German until the ascendancy of English. Turing's famous work is in German.
No one serious was publishing in Russian, Italian, etc. There was a clear lingua franca.
Lets see who is lying and who is telling the truth.
> Depending on the field of science it was either French or German and transitioned to English.
Charles Darwin did his work in french? Or was it german? What language did faraday, maxwell, dalton, etc use? French or german? What language did lord kelvin to give us the temperature scale? Can you point to a single scientific paper that an english or american scientist wrote in german or french?
> For physics it was German moving into English over that 100 years.
Yes I know. I'm not denying that english is lingua franca.
> In math French was a bit more of a player.
Bit of a more player? That's proving my point. French was not lingua franca. Nobody would say 'english is bit of a more player' in math, science, business, politics, etc. Lingua franca is obvious. You don't have to miscontrue it with such weasely language.
> Turing's famous work is in German.
I don't know german and I've read turing's original works on computation, AI, morphogenesis, etc. Have you? They were most definitely not written in german. What's with people who know absolutely nothing writing with such authority?
> There was a clear lingua franca.
So tell me what 'lingua franca' turing was publishing his work in. It wasn't german like you claimed so german wasn't lingua franca. It surely as hell wasn't french.
The only lingua franca in europe before english was latin. Neither french nor german ever was 'lingua franca' as you've clearly proved with turing. At best you could argue that english, french and german were major players in science, math, etc. But certainly there was no lingua franca until english took over post-ww2.
Lower them more you mean?
As a native English speaker having learnt a foreign language, I can tell you that we're pretty goddamn lax in comparison. The English have long since made peace with the fact that their language has been usurped. They're okay with it, and make concessions for foreign language speakers; as long as the meaning is understood, nobody bothers correcting you.
Now try speaking French in France, or German in Germany. I don't know about Japanese in Japan, but I imagine it's the same or worse (from what I've heard second hand).
This has nothing to do with any property of english or it's speakers, it is simply the path of least resistance for everyone involved. Due to media and existing materials, english (even badly worded/spoken) is much easier to pick up than most languages and opens up the most opportunities to the most people.
Learning Chinese is for example is much more difficult for most non-chinese with no added benefit unless they travel to china or work for a chinese company.
Perhaps if english was renamed to internationalese it would make things easier and more palatable.
The biggest example of this is the internet, where we have many types of cable to carry information, and many applications that want to talk to each other, but everything speaks IP.
see also: containerized shipping, nema motor mounts.
So true, it is hard if english is not your first language, but there is this huge advantage to having a single common language that everyone speaks. today it is english, before that french, and before that latin.
As it might be possible for us to eventually improve our machine translation, it might be more valuable to keep his papers in Japanese.
The challenge comes where errors may have impacted intelligibility or worse still changed their meaning. This kind of misunderstanding is common and I'm not surprised it needs extra effort - I had a major disruption this week when an ESL coworker misunderstood the meaning of a particular ambiguous word in a project even though this exact difficulty was anticipated and time was spent up front to clarify it.
Not being moderately fluent in english is inexcusable in the modrn world, in the same that not being tech savvy, or not able to do math is inexcusable. There are basic skills that one needs to operate in a modern world. English is one of them. I appreciate the sentiment, but it's akin to complaining that "In the star wars universe, scientists who don't speak Galactic Basic Standard are at a huge disadvantage." Yes, they are, and it's their fault for not learning the common language. Same with English in 2023.
But yeah, English has become pretty much the standard language for many purposes and if you didn’t learn it as a native it’s something you have to learn as a non-native for many purposes.
A part of me wants something like Esperanto to take over this space.
English is an easy language to learn. I'm ESL and it's no big deal.
For example, a Japanese person probably would find learning English to the level required to publish academic papers to be a “big deal”.
If you're Dutch, you're not going to learn Italian just to holiday in Rome.
Not everyone would be learning English as a second language. In many parts of the world you may need to know some regional language in addition to your native one, so English would be your third, not second language.
Yes, that's kind of what I was getting at; I think everyone should go through the same hurdles instead of creating a huge advantage for about ~400 million people while the remaining 7.6 billion people have to do extra work.
If we chose a language that isn't really spoken natively, then in theory we could create a system that doesn't give an inherent advantage to any one group.
Obviously that can't be strictly true in practice; a language like Esperanto would give advantages to people more used to European languages, and other conlangs or abandoned languages would have other issues.
> English is an easy language to learn. I'm ESL and it's no big deal.
Is that true? I've always heard that English is a hard language to learn.
There's something to be said about my educational privilege and the geographic context of my being ESL. Obviously it's probably harder to learn english if your first language isn't that of a country that has colonized England at one point and you don't grow up within walking distance of the USA, but considering that billions of people have english as a second language and totally manage to convey whatever idea they want when they speak or write it I don't think my point that it's no big deal to learn it is outlandish. It's the most spoken language and it's speakers are all over the globe, there isn't a language that's as accessible to practice as english.
I think levelling by the bottom by forcing everyone to learn a second language (which would become a lot of privileged kids' first language after a few generations anyway) isn't a very interesting idea.
Also the completely irregular spelling. You need to learn every word twice, first how to write, then how to speak. You can't just infer the sounds from the written word. Languages like Esperanto or German are better in this regard, you learn how to write a word and the odds are you'll know how it sounds as well.
Is 95% an accurate number? What percentage are not native speakers, but have near native fluency? I've been to Iceland and Denmark and everyone I spoke to in those places could speak English with near native fluency. I remember meeting one guy in a tiny village in northern Iceland. He sounded like a completely native American English speaker. It turned out that he had never even left his village to travel to Reykjavik, but still had me fooled into thinking that surely he had spent significant amount of time in America.
You are right to wonder about that, but even when we assume every ESL speaker to be fluent enough the proportion only drops to 80%.
But one thing that's missed is the advantage ESL speakers have: they by definition speak at least one other language. English speakers either don't have to or find it too hard to find someone to practise on even if they want to learn.
The fact that English is the lingua franca of science has another advantage even to ESL speakers: they only have to learn English to communicate with just about any other scientist in the world. Imagine having to pick between learning English, French, German, Japanese, Latin, depending on who you wanted your audience to be?