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I think the point that most grad programs don't have US students is revealing - for those who have alternative entry into the US economy, most people decide tha
by Eridrus 8y ago
I think the point that most grad programs don't have US students is revealing - for those who have alternative entry into the US economy, most people decide that a PhD program is a poor choice.
Most of the things people work on in their PhD programs are very niche, and most do not work in academia or on the same thing after they finish their PhD. And most people never really make a noticeable contribution to science with their thesis. So I'm a bit skeptical that we're losing all this valuable knowledge overseas, rather than PhD programs being about signaling their skill to employers and our byzantine immigration process. Not to say that people learn nothing valuable, but the number of people I've worked with who did a Math PhD and then never used that knowledge ever again is surprisingly high.
I think the US should be less concerned about whether it is on top wrt publications, but about whether English remains the language of scholarship, because if Chinese folks start publishing in Mandarin, that's going to be a far bigger loss to English speaking countries than if we do not originate as much research.
- mc32 8y ago>if Chinese folks start publishing in Mandarin They may, and then it will be like during the cold war where Soviets published in Russian and we'd be lucky if someone translated that into English. If it were to happen today, someone would make a business out of translating the publications --maybe even crowdsource the translations.
- cryptozeus 8y agoWould bd so easy to translate in this day and age
- btrettel 8y agoEasier, but not easy. During my PhD I've translated about a dozen papers into English, mostly from Russian. Google Translate and Yandex Translate did the actual translation (I would compare the two), but what they produce is not always intelligible or correct. On a few more important papers I went through the paper sentence by sentence to clarify the translation. It's not uncommon that I have to change certain phrases because the software translates a phrase literally when the equivalent is not a literal translation, for example. Sometimes I didn't know what the equivalent terminology was without research and guesswork. I also added footnotes as appropriate if I thought they would help the reader understand something which would not be clear if they were unfamiliar with the original language or research culture. I would not be surprised if I spent over 100 hours on a particular series of 3 papers alone. I don't mind the time, as I enjoyed the process and learned a lot from it. The good news is that I think the feedback I provided Google Translate improved the quality of the product's translation of scientific Russian, it is slowly getting better.
- reacweb 8y agoI always complain about the poor results from google translate between english and french. It works well for litteral translations, but I do not need help for litteral translations. I need help to translate from idioms in a language toward idioms in the other one. I often use https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator which is slightly better than google translate.
- alfredallan 8y agoThe Chinese language does not lend itself to easy translation to English. It always gets "easier", but not quite good enough. At least not for sophisticated purposes like research.
- houshuang 8y agoIf they start publishing in Chinese? The commercial CNKI database indexes 10,406 Chinese language academic journals, and 63 million articles. Arguably, much of it is of low quality (although there are plenty of Western journals of questionable quality as well), but that's a different discussion. If you rephrased the question as "When the leading Chinese scholar chooses to publish in the most prestigious Chinese journal, rather than Nature or Science" - would be a more interesting question.
- bajablast 8y agoUnrelated, but I often notice that lots of stack overflow and github issues get translated into chinese by someone. It's kinda interesting to see
- xvilka 8y agoThen everyone will just learn Chinese，like everyone learnt English before.
- goblekitepe 8y agoThe process of English becoming the global language has taken over 150 years. Massive cultural and economic forces have been at play to make English global. It's not a simple thing, and what will likely happen is language balkanization for a significant period of time before any seismic shift from English to Chinese which is unlikely to happen for a number of reasons regardless.
- partycoder 8y agoBefore World War II, French was more popular than English.
- hyperbovine 8y agoSource please.
- cm2187 8y agoBut none of what it takes for Chinese to posibly overtake one day is in place. Schools aren’t mass teaching chinese, chinese movies, music and authors aren’t captivating people’s mind, and there is already a modern latin (english), so learning chinese isn’t going to fix a problem people have, other than communicating with Chinese nationals who do not speak english.
- partycoder 8y agoMore people are learning German in the EU now, and now there is also Brexit, which removes English as an official language there. Simultaneously, the role of the UK as a trade hub will be heavily diminished. I would not be surprised if in 50 years German surpassed English in the EU. China is heavily investing on Africa, so I would not be impressed if Africans start learning Mandarin more actively than they do now. African population is the one experiencing the fastest growth at the moment. In the Americas, I would expect things to remain more or less the same. Historically, the Chinese have been very hermetic when it comes to foreign policy. Chinese yuans (RMB) are not as liquid as dollars, and that seems intentional as they want to keep tight control of their currency value. But they do seem more expansive recently... opening overseas military bases in Djibouti, etc.
- msaharia 8y agoThat simply won't happen. 1. US isn't the only country which publishes in English. The entire Western hemisphere does. Not to mention India, already the most populous English-speaking country in the world, and has barely scratched the surface when it comes to English literacy. 2. Science needs interaction to thrive. Publishing textbooks in Mandarin is a very different ballgame than cutting edge research papers. I don't see that changing and China has invested massively in English education already. Tldr: English will remain the defacto global Lingua Franca of science.
- mrb 8y ago«English will remain the defacto global Lingua Franca of science.» Just like Latin remained the defacto lingua franca of science? :-)
- jabl 8y agoWe should all switch to Esperanto! :)
- BillChapman 8y agoKial ne uzi Esperanton? Why not use Esperanto?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yesenadam 8y agode facto lingua franca Latin was for hundreds of years, if not longer, and it's still doing OK by the look of it.
- rsj_hn 8y agoLatin was the Lingua Franca of science until the 17th Century, or 1300 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire (Sorry Byzantium), so if that's not evidence for the stickiness of languages, I'm not sure what else you'd need. Wait for 1000 years after the North America, India, Western European civilizations collapse, and we'll see what international language scientists are using -- there's a good chance it will still be English.
- alfredallan 8y agoGood that you raised the point of language. This is already a problem in the area of chip (IC) manufacturing. A very large number of newly designed chips now have their specifications published only in Chinese.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoI don't think Mandarin Chinese is that well suited for scientific publishing. I'm not at a high level of reading proficiency in Chinese, but the language seems to be rather bad at incorporating foreign words. On the other hand, cooperation among Chinese scholars is only going to increase, so papers will increasingly be published in Chinese. Another factor is that China doesn't really have a reputation for honesty and transparency...
- gumby 8y ago> I don't think Mandarin Chinese is that well suited for scientific publishing. Ignoring path dependency the same could be said of English. And while that path dependency provides hysteresis, it doesn't imply inevitability; Arabic and Latin had good runs as dominant scientific language but were eventually overtaken by English, which will ultimately be overtaken in turn.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoMy point is that Mandarin has some genuine disadvantages over other languages. For example the effort involved in incorporating foreign words. Mandarin excludes a lot of syllables common in other languages, so you need to choose different sounds to replace the word. Worse, you have to pick characters for these syllables which preferably don't have ridiculous or offensive side meanings. Then everybody in the field has to learn the sounds and the characters. If as a non-native you want to talk about your subject in Chinese, it's almost as if you had to study the whole subject again. Another really not nice thing about Mandarin is that its phonemes are generally less redundant. Let alone the tones, there are lots of consonants to distinguish, and in general, the average syllable contains more information than in other languages (Spanish or Hawaiian at the extreme end). So any noise in a communication channel, or a not-so-experienced speaker and it's unintelligible. That's also one reason why Mandarin still uses Chinese Characters. Especially with dialects, native Mandarin speakers can have trouble understanding each other. Arabic has some of the same problems, if less pronounced, but its strength (in my opinion) was the reach of standard Arabic as written and spoken language of a major Religion, and it was/is used as trading language. Latin was very good at assimilating foreign words. Again, it was the language of an empire and of a state religion. I won't say that the success of English is only due to its linguistic advantages. Clearly, the cultural dominance of English speaking countries has helped. But still, it's a lot easier to learn than most languages, especially for people from indoeuropean backgrounds. Even for Chinese it seems to be easier to learn English than learn to write Mandarin to a high proficiency. That's why I don't believe Mandarin will dominate over English, not even in a distant future. And there just is no other contender to the throne. The most likely alternative would be something that evolves from English, but with the current language being preserved in the cultural permafrost of books, movies and the internet, that's going to take a while.
- WilliamEdward 8y agoYou're all missing one important point: The advancements of translation technology. In due time it might not even be necessary to learn any other language at all. I wouldn't even put a single penny on Chinese becoming the dominant language, even besides this fact.
- jjeaff 8y agoHow much has it really advanced? I hear this all the time, but I am always unimpressed when I see actual results.
- WilliamEdward 8y agoNot much admittedly. But the potential is there, just no one really put any effort into it yet.
- mrep 8y agoI recently stumbled upon GAFAM [0] which is a french acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft and google translate auto-translated the page really well. I even went off to some the french sources and google translate handled them all amazingly well. [0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM
- wbl 8y agoLearn Mandarin. They learned English, we had to learn German and French.