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If people don't like English being the lingua franca of science, they should encourage translation of foreign language articles. Unfortunately scientific transl

If people don't like English being the lingua franca of science, they should encourage translation of foreign language articles. Unfortunately scientific translation seems to have declined significantly since the 1950s and 1960s. I wrote a Stack Exchange post about locating translations of scientific articles and few of the sources I mention are currently active: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143 The rise of English as the lingua franca of science certainly would lead to less translations being produced, but I don't think it should reduce to near zero as it seems to have. Today there's still valuable research that's not published in English. During my PhD I published several translations (all produced via Google Translate and manual editing) and consistently people thought this was some weird quirk of mine. But I enjoyed it and learned quite a few things I would not have known otherwise.

jhbadger 7y ago
It used to be required that PhD students (even in the sciences, and in the US) had to demonstrate written understanding of at least one foreign language. When I got my doctorate in microbiology in the 1990s that rule was still officially on the books, but not enforced. But certainly before WWII and even into the 1960s there was a lot of research being published in Russian, French and German besides English. Even today, China still publishes many Chinese-language journals which go mostly untranslated.
- madengr 7y ago
  They had this requirement at KU in the 90’s, but a computer “language” satisfied the requirement.
bsder 7y ago
> If people don't like English being the lingua franca of science, they should encourage translation of foreign language articles. Unfortunately scientific translation seems to have declined significantly since the 1950s and 1960s. Really? I don't think there was ever much translation. Before WWII, a LOT of science was in German (arguably more of a scientific lingua franca than English at the time), and it seems like conferences (ie. face-to-face communication) were the primary way that scientific advances crossed languages.
- btrettel 7y ago
  > Really? I don't think there was ever much translation. Look at my Stack Exchange post. I know from the "Consolidated Index of Translations into English" that there were ad-hoc English translations of very roughly 300,000 articles produced from 1953 to 1986 (that were reported to the index). That's ignoring the cover-to-cover translation journals too. This isn't everything, but it's a lot. In my experience the ad-hoc translations tended to pick the most important articles that the cover-to-cover translation journals missed.
  - bsder 7y ago
    But wasn't that basically compiled by the US intelligence agencies? So, those translations are a unique artifact of the Cold War, no? It appears that there was never any drive for translation from the scientific side.
    - btrettel 7y ago
      While I think the Cold War increased interested in translations, I don't think US intelligence agencies were the driving force. If I had to guess I'd say that the driving force appears to have been scientific interest in what "the other side" was doing. That combined with the fact that English wasn't the lingua franca of science then as far as I'm aware. The index I mentioned was produced by the Special Libraries Association, which is an organization that still exists today and has no link to US intelligence as far as I'm aware. The CIA has their own public translations index circa the 1960s (with a similar name) but that largely duplicates this one, and as far as I'm aware rarely mentions actual CIA translations. The most common type of translation listed is the TT series. The TT series had nothing to do with intelligence agencies as far as I'm aware. Looks like it was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Special Libraries Association: https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trstt.html https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trstt.html The UK translations series I've seen were entirely motivated by scientific interest. In fact, I recall that while looking through a UK translations index I found a form to request a translation. Seems to have been addressed to scientists as intelligence agencies presumably would have the resources to translate articles in-house. Also, the large number of cover-to-cover translation journals, many of which continue today, would suggest there is appreciable scientific interest in translations.
gumby 7y ago
Angewandte Chemie is an internationally significant scientific journal published in German.
- dbcurtis 7y ago
  A fair amount of good recent robotics papers are also published in German. My daughter was at an internship and found a good robotics paper in German relevant to her project and actually found it reasonably easy going with high-school AP-German level of language skill. Of course a robotics paper is half math anyway, and German isn't shy about borrowing technical terms from other languages.

jhbadger 7y ago

It used to be required that PhD students (even in the sciences, and in the US) had to demonstrate written understanding of at least one foreign language. When I got my doctorate in microbiology in the 1990s that rule was still officially on the books, but not enforced. But certainly before WWII and even into the 1960s there was a lot of research being published in Russian, French and German besides English. Even today, China still publishes many Chinese-language journals which go mostly untranslated.

madengr 7y ago
They had this requirement at KU in the 90’s, but a computer “language” satisfied the requirement.

bsder 7y ago

> If people don't like English being the lingua franca of science, they should encourage translation of foreign language articles. Unfortunately scientific translation seems to have declined significantly since the 1950s and 1960s. Really? I don't think there was ever much translation. Before WWII, a LOT of science was in German (arguably more of a scientific lingua franca than English at the time), and it seems like conferences (ie. face-to-face communication) were the primary way that scientific advances crossed languages.

btrettel 7y ago
> Really? I don't think there was ever much translation. Look at my Stack Exchange post. I know from the "Consolidated Index of Translations into English" that there were ad-hoc English translations of very roughly 300,000 articles produced from 1953 to 1986 (that were reported to the index). That's ignoring the cover-to-cover translation journals too. This isn't everything, but it's a lot. In my experience the ad-hoc translations tended to pick the most important articles that the cover-to-cover translation journals missed.
- bsder 7y ago
  But wasn't that basically compiled by the US intelligence agencies? So, those translations are a unique artifact of the Cold War, no? It appears that there was never any drive for translation from the scientific side.
  - btrettel 7y ago
    While I think the Cold War increased interested in translations, I don't think US intelligence agencies were the driving force. If I had to guess I'd say that the driving force appears to have been scientific interest in what "the other side" was doing. That combined with the fact that English wasn't the lingua franca of science then as far as I'm aware. The index I mentioned was produced by the Special Libraries Association, which is an organization that still exists today and has no link to US intelligence as far as I'm aware. The CIA has their own public translations index circa the 1960s (with a similar name) but that largely duplicates this one, and as far as I'm aware rarely mentions actual CIA translations. The most common type of translation listed is the TT series. The TT series had nothing to do with intelligence agencies as far as I'm aware. Looks like it was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Special Libraries Association: https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trstt.html https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/trstt.html The UK translations series I've seen were entirely motivated by scientific interest. In fact, I recall that while looking through a UK translations index I found a form to request a translation. Seems to have been addressed to scientists as intelligence agencies presumably would have the resources to translate articles in-house. Also, the large number of cover-to-cover translation journals, many of which continue today, would suggest there is appreciable scientific interest in translations.

gumby 7y ago

Angewandte Chemie is an internationally significant scientific journal published in German.

dbcurtis 7y ago
A fair amount of good recent robotics papers are also published in German. My daughter was at an internship and found a good robotics paper in German relevant to her project and actually found it reasonably easy going with high-school AP-German level of language skill. Of course a robotics paper is half math anyway, and German isn't shy about borrowing technical terms from other languages.