Overcoming Language Barriers in Academia: Machine Translation Tools and a Vision for a Multilingual Future

Abstract

Having a central scientific language remains crucial for advancing and globally sharing science. Nevertheless, maintaining one dominant language also creates barriers to accessing scientific careers and knowledge. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we describe how, when, and why to make scientific literature more readily available in multiple languages through the practice of translation. We broadly review the advantages and limitations of neural machine translation systems and propose that translation can serve as both a short- and a long-term solution for making science more resilient, accessible, globally representative, and impactful beyond the academy. We outline actions that individuals and institutions can take to support multilingual science and scientists, including structural changes that encourage and value translating scientific literature. In the long term, improvements to machine translation technologies and collective efforts to change academic norms can transform a monolingual scientific hub into a multilingual scientific network. Translations are available in the supplemental material.

Characteristics of scholarly journals published in non‐English‐speaking countries: An analysis of Library and Information Science SCOPUS journals

“…Generally, regional journals are perceived as qualitatively inferior to international journals (Dinkel et al, 2004; Kirchik et al, 2012); however, as Navas‐Fernández et al (2018) pointed out, although quality and internationality are often complimentary, they are different concepts and not mutually exclusive. High‐quality research can be conducted in NESC without foreign involvement or influence, and excellent research can be published in non‐English‐speaking regional journals (Steigerwald et al, 2022).…”

“…Enhancing the international visibility and impact of research from various regions will expand scholarly communities that currently focus on research in the English‐speaking Western world. It will also contribute to the advancement of universal knowledge (Amano, Berdejo‐Espinola, et al, 2021; Amano, Rios Rojas, et al, 2021; Salager‐Meyer, 2014; Steigerwald et al, 2022) while rewarding researchers from NESC by increasing their visibility in international scholarly communities, giving them global readership, increasing citations of their work and augmenting the impact of their research and their connections with researchers from other countries (Gazni & Ghaseminik, 2016; Sin, 2005).…”

“…Since English is perceived as the scientific lingua franca , most international journals and scholarly events consider English their official language (Steigerwald et al, 2022). Although having a common language can facilitate international scholarly communication (Montgomery, 2013), this has led to the assumption that significant scholarly communication takes place in English—an assumption that also applies to publications in English‐language international journals.…”

“…As a result, international journals currently focus on research in the English‐speaking Western world, and non‐English‐language regional journals are perceived as qualitatively inferior to English‐language international journals (Dinkel et al, 2004; Kirchik et al, 2012). However, it has been widely acknowledged that regional journals from non‐English‐speaking countries (NESC) make unique and valuable contributions to global scholarly knowledge (Amano, Berdejo‐Espinola, et al, 2021; Amano, Rios Rojas, et al, 2021; Angulo et al, 2021; Khelifa et al, 2021; Márquez & Porras, 2020; Salager‐Meyer, 2014; Steigerwald et al, 2022).…”

10. How Conservation Practice Can Generate Evidence

“…Google Translate and DeepL) has been improving, aiding some of the stages in finding evidence (e.g. for reading full texts [Stages 3 and 4], Zulfiqar et al, 2018;Steigerwald et al, 2022). However, even a few critical errors, for instance, when translating search strings (Stage 1) and extracting information (Stage 4) could have major consequences.…”