I think scientific translations are undervalued in academia and the general public. Whether or not a direct scientific discovery is made is irrelevant in my vie

I think scientific translations are undervalued in academia and the general public. Whether or not a direct scientific discovery is made is irrelevant in my view, as this work enables other discoveries to be made. Still, making a good translation can require deep understanding of the subject and offers plenty of opportunity for scientific discovery. The translator can be one of the first few to understand an important work. I think most people would agree that understanding an important work early can be advantageous. At least a few of the scientific contributions I've made were motivated by things I translated, as appears to also be the case for Émilie du Châtelet. An acquaintance of mine in linguistics told me that translations are treated as roughly equivalent to a conference paper in linguistics, where journal articles are considered first-class. I think this setup is better than the status-quo in engineering, CS, physics, or math where translations are often treated as a waste of time. Today, most science is published in English, but for problems which have existed for a long time, it can be worthwhile to consult the foreign "archival literature" for important papers that haven't been translated or appreciated. (Or even digitized, frequently!) Edit: If there's a particular paper you're interested in finding a translation of, I'd recommend looking at this Stack Exchange post I made about locating existing translations: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143