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posted by janrinok on Monday January 02 2017, @01:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the brush-up-your-esperanto dept.

English is now considered the common language, or 'lingua franca', of global science. All major scientific journals seemingly publish in English, despite the fact that their pages contain research from across the globe.

However, a new study suggests that over a third of new scientific reports are published in languages other than English, which can result in these findings being overlooked - contributing to biases in our understanding.

As well as the international community missing important science, language hinders new findings getting through to practitioners in the field say researchers from the University of Cambridge.

They argue that whenever science is only published in one language, including solely in English, barriers to the transfer of knowledge are created.

The Cambridge researchers call on scientific journals to publish basic summaries of a study's key findings in multiple languages, and universities and funding bodies to encourage translations as part of their 'outreach' evaluation criteria.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday January 02 2017, @03:43AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday January 02 2017, @03:43AM (#448378) Journal

    It won't matter for long since Google's machine learning amped Google Translate [nytimes.com] is making waves.

    Add 5-10 years of development and a little careful tuning, and we'll see Chinese/Russian/Japanse/Arabic/Spanish/French->English, etc. machine translations of novels seeming more poetic than ever. For very specific and carefully-worded material like scientific journal articles, it should be even easier to translate. There shouldn't be any ambiguity, folkiness, or koan riddles to deal with in the case of a chemistry or math paper.

    That doesn't necessarily solve the problem mentioned in the summary. What would help is automatic distribution and machine translation of non-English scientific articles. Instantaneous and distributed into the right databases where they will turn up in searches. The obstacle there may be the paywall rather than the language. Another language might artificially limit human progress. A paywall undoubtedly limits human progress.

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