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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @07:18AM
Time for a new meta-language that represents spoken language with a clear structure so that it can be auto-translated into multiple languages. I'm not sure Esperanto by itself is precise enough. For example, you know those parts-of-speech trees we created in English class? Well, the meta language should represent those unambiguously. Maybe merge Esperanto and Lisp? The problem is that turning it back into native languages could introduce ambiguities. Legal-speak may also suggest ideas.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday January 02 2017, @11:10AM
(is newspeak (adjective (* 2 plus) good))
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