[GOAL] Translate Science

[Victor VENEMA]

A new group is launched today working on promoting the translation of 
the scientific/scholarly literature. Translations are an important way 
to improve two-way scholarly communication. They make science more 
inclusive and effective.

We are interested in a range of activities to help translations: 
providing information (on making and finding translations), networking, 
designing and building tools and lobbying for seeing translations as 
valuable research output.

https://blog.translatescience.org/launch-of-translate-science/

 > **Launch of Translate Science**
 > > Translate Science is interested in the translation of the scholarly 
literature. Translate Science is an open volunteer group interested in 
improving the translation of the scientific literature. The group has 
come together to support work on tools, services and advocate for 
translating science.
 >
 > The groups members have different background and motivations. 
Hydrogeologist Dasapta Irawan would like scientists to be able to write 
in the language of the people they serve. Ben Trettel works on the 
breakup of turbulent water jets and regrets that so much insight from 
the Russian turbulence literature is ignored. Victor Venema works on 
observed climate trends and needs information on (historical) 
measurement methods, which are kept in local languages; his field needs 
to understand climate impacts everywhere and quality data from all 
countries of the world. Luke Okelo, Johanssen Obanda and Jo Havemann are 
working with AfricArxiv – the community-led Open Access portal to 
promote African research output. They are interested in seeing 
scientific literature in African languages transcend traditional 
scholarly publishing barriers that indigenous languages come up against 
and will soon launch a collaborative effort to translate African 
scholarly manuscripts into various African languages.
 >
 > For the group the term “scientific literature” has a wide spectrum of 
forms and can mean anything from articles, reports and books, to 
abstracts, titles, keywords and terms. Summaries in other languages are 
also helpful.
 >
 > We are interested in a range of activities to help translations: 
providing information, networking, designing and building tools and 
lobbying for seeing translations as valuable research output.
 >
 > We have this blog, our Wiki, our distribution list and a 
micro-blogging account for discussions on what we can do to promote 
translations and to provide information on how to make translations and 
find already existing ones.
 >
 > Various tools (and communities using them) could help finding and 
producing translations. A database with translated articles could make 
them more discoverable. This database should be filled by people and 
institutions who made translations, as well as with precursor databases 
and articles from translation journals (from the Cold War era). With 
appropriate interfaces (APIs) reference managers, journal and preprint 
repositories and peer review systems could automatically indicate that 
translations are available. Such a database could also help build 
datasets that can be used to train machine learning method for the 
translation of digitally small languages.
 >
 > There are great tools for the collaborative translations of software 
interfaces. Similar tools for scientific articles would be even more 
helpful: translating an article well requires knowledge of two languages 
and the topic; this combination is easier to achieve with a group and 
together translating is more fun. Automatic translations could provide a 
first draft and save a lot of work.
 >
 > If we could determine which articles are most valuable to be 
translated that may increase the incentives of (national) science 
foundations to fund their translation. With the use of the multilingual 
Wikidata knowledgebase we could improve searching the literature with 
multilingual tools, so that also relevant articles in other languages 
are found. In addition we could make text mining multilingual and 
non-native speakers could be presented with explanations in their mother 
tongue of difficult terms.
 >
 > Rather than being appreciated, translations sometimes even lead to 
punishments. Google accidentally punishes people translating keywords 
because their software sees that as keyword spamming, while translated 
articles are often seen as plagiarism. We need to talk about such 
problems and change such tools and rules so that scientists translating 
their articles are instead rewarded.
 >
 > English as a common language has made global communication within 
science easier. However, this has made communication with non-English 
communities harder. For English-speakers it is easy to overestimate how 
many people speak English because we mostly deal with foreigners who do 
speak English. It is thought that that about one billion people speak 
English. That means that seven billion people do not. For example, at 
many weather services in the Global South only few people master 
English, but they use the translated guidance reports of the World 
Meteorological Organization (WMO) a lot. For the WMO, as a membership 
organization of the weather services, where every weather service has 
one vote, translating all its guidance reports into many languages is a 
priority.
 >
 > Non-English or multilingual speakers, in both African (and 
non-African) continents, could participate in science on an equal 
footing by having a reliable system where scientific work written in 
non-English language is accepted and translated into English (or any 
other language) and vice versa. Language barriers should not waste 
scientific talent.
 >
 > Translated scientific articles open science to regular people, 
science enthusiasts, activists, advisors, trainers, consultants, 
architects, doctors, journalists, planners, administrators, technicians 
and scientists. Such a lower barrier to participating in science is 
especially important on topics such as climate change, environment, 
agriculture and health. The easier knowledge transfer goes both ways: 
people benefiting from scientific knowledge and people having knowledge 
scientists should know. Translations thus help both science and society. 
They aid innovation and tackling the big global challenges in the fields 
of climate change, agriculture and health.
 >
 > Translated scientific articles speed up scientific progress by 
tapping into more knowledge and avoiding double work. They thus improve 
the quality and efficiency of science. Translations can improve public 
disclosure, scientific engagement and science literacy. The production 
of translated scientific articles also creates a training dataset to 
improve automatic translations, which for most languages is still lacking.
 >
 > As you have read this far you are probably interested in translations 
and science. Do join us. Write us any time: we have 2-weekly calls and a 
mailing list. Leave a comment below. Add your knowledge and ideas to our 
Wiki. Write a blog post to start a discussion. Join us on social media 
or add this blog to your RSS reader. Spread the message that Translate 
Science exists to anyone who may be interested as well. …




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Victor Venema
Grassroots Journals
https://grassroots.is

E-mail: Victor.Venema at grassroots.is
E-mail: Victor.Venema at protonmail.com
Homepage: http://www2.meteo.uni-bonn.de/victor
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GitHub: https://github.com/VictorVenema/

There is no need to answer my mails in your free time.
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