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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: 2) by melikamp on Monday January 02 2017, @09:18AM

    by melikamp (1886) on Monday January 02 2017, @09:18AM (#448447) Journal

    The Bible is a well-written work of fiction, and it isn't impossible for fiction to contain important lessons or thoughts.

    The scientific consensus is, the Bible is a compilation of works, only a few of them are well-written, and only a few of them are what we would call "fiction" in modern English. There are plenty of parts that are written terribly (see Mark) and/or have nothing to do with fiction (see most of the Torah, which is legalese, or private letters of Paul). On top of being apparently grossly misinformed about the Bible, what are the important lessons or thoughts which are relevant to this discussion that you want to allude to, in particular? The tower of Babel story? What's your take on it? How is it relevant to the issue at hand? You forgot to explain.

    Start with the realization that technical writing demands very precise use of language and is very different from other kinds of writing or conversation, no matter the base language, English, German or otherwise.

    If so, how and why would it entail one language being more efficient than several? It's not like using several languages is that more difficult than using one, so may be there's utility to using more than one?

    Exactly. If we already have English-plumber language, why do we need German-plumber language, Chinese-plumber language, Japanese-plumber language, French-plumber language, etc.? Is English-plumber language better suited for discussions of copper pipes while Chinese-plumber language allows more succinct expression of PVC piping? I'm not arguing against jargon, I'm arguing against dozens of functionally parallel sets of jargon in different languages. This is about technical writing, not artistic literature. Even if we allow that German is able to describe the subtle philosophical qualities of the orbit of an electron that requires ten extra words in English, we don't fucking care, it's not important.

    All the places you've mentioned have very different plumbing systems, and very different professional and technical constraints their respective cultures and laws impose on the plumbing. Are you ready to claim everyone on Earth is better off using exactly the same kind of plumbing, because there exists the perfect plumbing scheme, the best possible kind for every culture and state? And if not, if you allow that different cultures/states should experiment with different plumbing schemes, in order to continually improve the plumbing via a kind of evolution... then may be we have to admit it's OK, or even preferable for them to use somewhat different languages to describe the internals?

    Not the ones you're thinking of, I wager. The vast majority of programming languages are general programming languages, which by definition do not specialize. Out of the general programming languages, there are low and high level languages, object-oriented and functional languages.

    What are you talking about? Once a task is identified, there's typically just a handful languages which are practically suitable, and in many cases only one. Typically a platform will provide a huge constraint right away, and the nature of the task will narrow it down even more. Of course all practical languages are Turing-complete, and in that sense equivalent and "general", but in practice we are completely boxed in by the available libraries. Case in point, I dare you to tell me writing an html->xhtml translator is about the same in logo and in python. Are you still thinking of a language as some kind of formal spec, by the way? The language is what the community is doing with it, and almost none of the programming languages have anything formal to back them up, not in a mathematical sense, anyway, even though there would be no issue, given a desire. And the human language is distinctly free of any formality, since its interpretation is organically bound to its use, which is accomplished by squishy human brains, which do little more than Bayesian inference to construct the next sentence, logic just being an icing on the cake. So I don't quite understand what you mean by all languages being general, or at least I don't understand how that theoretic "generality" prevents them from competing with each other in various domains.

    And as we all know, "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

    This is gibberish. Most programs I used/read stopped well in advance, having a well-defined scope and all.

    The same applies to language: each language expands until it fulfills all the needs of its users, which ultimately involves subsuming other languages.

    This is unintelligible. The set of users and their needs is not a well-defined set by any stretch of imagination. Just saying it's a set doesn't make it so. Most successful programming languages I know more or less stopped when they could accomplish what their authors set out to accomplish. There are some exceptions, such as C, which arguably went on to do more, but still not nearly everything, or else there wouldn't be hooks from C to every other language out there!

    The purpose of language is communication. Communication requires a shared standard between the parties. Having multiple divergent standards hinders communication, which is the purpose of language. Having multiple divergent languages hinders the primary purpose of language.

    The English language does not have a "purpose", and no one in particular designed it or honed it for any particular purpose. Also, try to define the notion "communication" without using the notion of "language", and see how the first sentence above implodes on itself. Isn't a "communication" just an instance of using "language"? Say, can two parties communicate without language? WTF does that even mean? Doesn't English have sub-languages? Are there definite borders between English, plumber-English, UK English, English spoken in Berlin, and German spoken by UK immigrants in Berlin? Does the English have a standard? Can it? Should it? Have you seen French or Russian? They have more standards than most extant human languages, but are you attracted to them?

    To say it another way, I have no doubt you can use English for the purpose of communication with, say, your life partner, but what does it mean to say the English language itself has a purpose, and that purpose is communication? Can you use English to communicate with a flower or a star? I know people try all the time, but they obviously fail badly. You seem to assume you should be able to use the same language to communicate with Japanese and Germans, are you saying they should homogenize with you? Generally speaking, should all cultures converge? Should we try to make all computers speak English (or any one language of your choice) too, and nothing else? Where do you draw the line?

    All I am saying, the optimal number of human languages in the solar system is somewhat of a mystery, and is probably bigger than one, just looking at the vast variety of environments and needs. I am happy to let the evolution take its course and come up with an answer, and if it's 1, I won't complain. However, I see no better way in the meanwhile other than a translation nexus, since we obviously do not know which language(s) will take the cake, and we want nothing but the best.

    Is it even possible to write everything in LISP?

    It is indeed, assuming that you understand the difference between a language and an implementation (and you of course understand that LISP is an extremely broad category containing many different language).

    I am looking at the practical problems, so tell me, given the current state of the art, can we write a kernel in LISP? What hardware would it run on? And why would we want it to be written in something like LISP, when other languages are much more efficient for communicating with the hardware available?

    Wouldn't a universal language necessarily be mediocre at everything?

    No, why would it?

    Because if we create any kind of constraint, there is instantly a more efficient language, and no practical communication I know of is without constraints. If all you need is to send a periodic altitude measurement, a simple bit sequence coding integers will probably do better than anything else. But If you want to seduce a sexy specimen, a complex language involving air pressure waves, appendage motion, and chemical interation may be necessary.

    So in some sense, there is a "universal language" for the solar system, but it may just be a super-language which subsumes within itself dozens of human and hundreds of computer languages, and rules for translating between them. If so (and please, think of it as an engineer), would you make sure everyone can speak the full language, or would you make sure everyone can speak it well enough to get by within the system, even though it could mean speaking about 0.1% of the total? And wouldn't the latter scenario mean, in so many words, settling with multiple languages?

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday January 02 2017, @05:04PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday January 02 2017, @05:04PM (#448565) Journal

    All the places you've mentioned have very different plumbing systems, and very different professional and technical constraints their respective cultures and laws impose on the plumbing. Are you ready to claim everyone on Earth is better off using exactly the same kind of plumbing, because there exists the perfect plumbing scheme, the best possible kind for every culture and state? And if not, if you allow that different cultures/states should experiment with different plumbing schemes, in order to continually improve the plumbing via a kind of evolution... then may be we have to admit it's OK, or even preferable for them to use somewhat different languages to describe the internals?

    This is actually an interesting argument. Language contains all sorts of cultural elements too. And while we'd like to think of some sort unified "scientific method" and "scientific language" that's perfectly identical for everyone, in reality scientists are people who are affected by cultural biases and ideas. Particularly when scientists face an impasse in research, sometimes having a vastly different cultural perspective may lead a scientist to look elsewhere... and actually come up with a creative idea due to an outside cultural influence that may lead to further progress.

    A couple of examples from the Scientific Revolution -- Isaac Newton's theory of gravity wouldn't have been possible without the concept of "unseen forces" acting at a distance. But the mainstream scientific establishment of that day was very skeptical of unseen forces, which they associated with mystical things like alchemy and witchcraft. They preferred the Aristotelean notion that things moved to a "natural place" and then stopped. The planets supposedly operated on different principles because they were made of up some form of "celestial matter" than didn't obey terrestrial rules. Anyhow, Newton is able to make a significant scientific advance here because he doesn't reject things like alchemy outright -- and inspired by these "unseen forces" he creates a revolutionary theory of gravity.

    Another example -- Johannes Kepler, like his mentor Tycho Brahe, was interested in detailed measurements of the planets. But he too faced an impasse in improving the models for planetary motion -- however, he started looking for proportions in motion. Why proportions? Because there was this traditional idea of the "harmony of spheres," a literal kind of music created within the heavens. Kepler knew that musical intervals were based on proportions (a 2:1 octave, 3:2 perfect fifth, etc.), so he tried fitting the planetary motions to these proportions. After a couple decades of such calculations, he discovered his laws of planetary motion, including what we still call the "harmonic law" even today. Although science textbooks don't generally talk about this today, Kepler truly believed the order of the planets was this musical order -- his "laws" were merely approximations of a sort.

    From a modern scientific perspective, we may look back on this stuff and be dismissive, but these scientists were inspired by cultural factors around them to search data and develop models in ways that led to significant scientific advances. And these are hardly unique in the history of science. There are plenty of times where major discoveries happen when someone was looking for something else (often something we'd now consider weird or even "unscientific" by modern standards), but ended up making a major discovery.

    Anyhow, my point is that languages are one place where these cultural differences are embedded and shaped. Languages also help to maintain cultural borders that allow such different perspectives to be developed in the first place.

    To be clear -- I absolutely agree that having these different languages is an major IMPEDIMENT to scientific discourse today. I agree with the summary or some other proposals here that we should either have translations of findings available or we should seek to have one standard language at a minimum that everything is translated into. But if you look at the history of scientific discovery, there's something to be said for preserving individual cultural perspectives, since the social influences on creativity in science (as well as ANY field of study) are often important in shaping method and assumptions, the kinds of connections we make between concepts, etc.