8 ms·

Non-native English speaking scientists work much harder just to keep up

59 points by amadeuspagel 3y ago

piuantiderp 3y ago
Whose problem is this?
veave 3y ago
I wonder if they will keep printing rubbish like this when the language of science becomes Chinese, which is not too far off.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  At the point you will see harmony championed over diversity.
- DFHippie 3y ago
  Why is it rubbish? It is useful for there to be some lingua franca. There are arguments for why English is a good candidate: - already widely spoken - economically important - simple word morphology - no grammatical gender - an alphabetic writing system that is relatively easy to learn There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns In any case, it's what we've got. But it is also true that communicating professionally in a language you learned for that purpose imposes a burden that native speakers don't face. If you find it boring to read attempts to quantify this, maybe this article isn't for you.
  - JadeNB 3y ago
    Thanks for this considered response! > obligatory gender in animate pronouns While it's just one in a long list of things, I'll point out that singular "they" is available (and has a long history) for people wishing to use non-gendered, animate pronouns. (I have also heard "it", but, while everyone's mileage will differ, my brain has a much harder time getting over the difficulty with reading "it" as animate than it does the difficulty with reading "they" as singular.)
  - zer8k 3y ago
    > There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns The only way to fix this is to make the lingua franca a constructed language. I'm not exactly against the idea of Esperanto being the lowest common denominator. However, there's this implication in your post and the article that English being the wrong language is some thinly veiled imperialism, racism, or something. Science is not that way. If there was an easier language to communicate to an audience with they'd use that. The "base" language of English is far, far simpler than other languages. Gendered pronouns are available in almost every language and English is one of the only languages where you can replace them with non-gendered pronouns if you so choose. In fact, I wrote this entire post without using any gendered language. This would be impossible in nearly any other widely spoken language. It would be easier if the frothing at the mouth pro-DEI-at-all-costs people would just say what they mean. Then the argument could be addressed correctly - English replaced Latin because it was easier and evolving. Chinese is the only language that would replace it based on paper-origin/language ratio and Chinese is an order of magnitude or more complicated. Even just speaking about the alphabet it's something like 100x larger.
    - nradov 3y ago
      Esperanto is mostly based on Indo-European group languages. Compared to English, Esperanto is only marginally easier to learn for people who grew up communicating in languages from other groups like Arabic or Chinese. If we wanted a more neutral language ideally suited to scientific discourse then Lojban would be the "logical" choice. But of course in the real world it's totally impractical. https://mw.lojban.org/ https://mw.lojban.org/
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Why do you think this? There are vastly more English speakers than Mandarin worldwide [1] and China is now only the second most populous country, overtaken by India. English is an official language of India and while not pervasively spoken overall, is pervasively spoken by the educated classes. I think Mandarin will have a hard time increasing its sphere of influence, despite what cyberpunk authors may have predicted 30 years ago. [1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#people-and-society https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#peop...
  - veave 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - ihateolives 3y ago
      [citation needed]
    - sonicshadow 3y ago
      [flagged]
  - dirtyid 3y ago
    TLDR is PRC has enough state capacity to produce and harness enough scientific talent to compete with global English in science, but likely not to replace it. PRC academic system that heavily focuses on science is spitting out educated classes that can in aggregate rival the size (and increasingly quality) of the English tertiary network. The current STEM production rate is ~5M or OECD combined. People mocked at PRC academic paper mills a few years ago, but now PRC talent is topping science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), that's the natural outcome of exploiting talent at PRC scale. Project trend to 2050 (past 26 years of new births already locked in) and PRC can feasibly hammer out 100M+ talent in just STEM, and most importantly, increasingly be able to retain talent without the best being brain drained. Effect going forward is that PRC is going to snowball the generation of high impact scientific research and it will increasingly be written in mandarin - PRC removed mandatory English education. PRC scientific base will likely be large enough to rival English RoW, the dynamic will be more the PRC science sphere will be less inclined to integrate with the Anglo sphere. Especially if translation tech improves. IMO the mandarin science ecosystem will be fine competing if not leading in her own bubble. If anything, the PRC might prefer the gatekeeping science behind language as a competitive advantage. Global science will splinter and mandarin science will be it's own pole. Shortcoming of India elite demographic dividend argument is, western academic institutes have limited capacity to absorb Indian talent, who let’s be frank, is replacing current cohort or PRC talent due to geopolitics which will make Indian brain drain problem worse and PRC talent retention better. English proficiency among brain drained elites will make spinning up indigenous Indian S&T at scale difficult, which India herself has a poor track record of exploiting. That can change with time obviously, but IMO there's something systemic happening with Indian diaspora doing well abroad for much longer than PRC diaspora but not meaningfully converting that into success for their birth country. Without India actually raising the ceiling for western academic ecosystem, you're looking at anglo and mandarin ecosystems competing closely. Unless anglos massively boost skill immigration, but that's politically difficult and the opposite is just as likely.
- zer8k 3y ago
  I agree with the actual point you're making. This is a thinly veiled DEI opinion article.
- wl 3y ago
  I'm skeptical that Chinese will ever become the international language of science as long as Hanzi is the dominant script used to write it.
  - ihateolives 3y ago
    Yup, people vastly understimate the effort needed to learn Mandarin. It's not in the same ballpark by far with Spanish, French of even Russian or Greek.
- nradov 3y ago
  China is most likely to suffer a severe economic and societal collapse due to their demographic problems within a couple decades. At that point their scientific productivity will also decline. There is no scenario in which Chinese becomes the dominant written language for scientific discourse. https://youtu.be/kBMSZ7v3KxQ https://youtu.be/kBMSZ7v3KxQ
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  This shit only comes out in low-risk situations. If Chinese was becoming standard, they'd go back to talking about rape culture in dog parks or whatever. It's why Queer Theory is so insane - very very low stakes. (If you don't believe me, read some Gayle Rubin or the less mainstream Foucault stuff).
  - Claude_Shannon 3y ago
    I don't understand what is the reason for this unrelated rant.
gemanor 3y ago
It's also interesting to see the affection of learning English in school as a child in this research. In Israel (where I live), there is a big argument lately on the importance of learning English as part of the mandatory school materials.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  I'm surprised it's not already taught in school. Even in US public schools, foreign languages are taught (poorly), most often Spanish.
  - cuttysnark 3y ago
    > are taught (poorly) Anecdotal. Here's another: my language teachers from year 3-12 were above average if anything—most of my peers were at least conversational in Spanish (or their selected language) by high school. At the time, the school system offered Spanish, French, German and Latin. Those who took Latin almost always had medical school ambitions. I asked.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  When I lived in Japan in the early 90's, English was a mandatory subject for school children even as early as elementary school. As far as I could tell, it was a waste of time - the kids hated studying it and thought it was a huge waste of their time.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    That's because any subject can be made boring and not that many people can make learning at least pleasant, if not fun.
bagacrap 3y ago
The article gives some blanket stats regarding the extra effort to be a non native English speaker, but they use a definition of native that excludes most of India. Even if it is not their first language, Indians have a clear advantage over, say, Chinese, in terms of typical English fluency. There's no way the "91% more time to read papers" figure applies equally to the median Chinese and median Indian scientist. That said, this article and paper don't really seem to provide any kind of solution, they just identify a problem. I don't really see what the scientific community can do about it? Aside from inventing a babel fish, this seems like a problem for education ministers around the globe.
- anovikov 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - JadeNB 3y ago
    I am a white, male, native English speaker. I benefit greatly from the fact that the scientific community of which I am a part was mostly set up by, and continues to operate for the benefit of, people like me. I do not feel, nor did this article make me feel, that I am bad for possessing these qualities; but I would feel bad if I tried to stick my head in the sand and not hear it when someone else told me about these issues. It's not my responsibility to solve all the problems caused for people not like me in a world that is set up for people like me, but I'm certainly not too fragile to at least be aware of them.
    - bannedbybros 3y ago
      [dead]
    - NoRelToEmber 3y ago
      > a world that is set up for people like me The anglosphere, not the world. I assure you there are many parts of the world not set up for people like you. I live in one of them. We don't feel guilty about building our corner of the world for our own benefit. But we also don't see our home country as a mere economic platform open for everyone.
tekla 3y ago
English is currently more or less the global language for most things international. The solution is to push even more English education if international scientists want to keep up. I would have the exact same opinion if Chinese was doing the same.
- zubiaur 3y ago
  100%. I'm very grateful for my family providing me with a foreign language education, particularly English. It's not obvious to me that Chinese is going to become the next global language, although if it were, I would provide my children with the means to learn it. I must say though, that at least when it comes to medical journal articles, some native chinese sources I've found were better written. Less verbose, flowery, jargony. Much more concise. Curious to know if this applies to other fields too.
- jostiniane 3y ago
  it's the cycle of civilizations and English got a turn, I agree that's the way. But the issue for most places is the fear to loose their language and identity slowly.. Pushing their own language in schools and universities is a way to keep it alive but does sacrifice people and leave them behind.. I come from a place where English is the third language and I can see the pain of brilliant people left behind because of that.
smackay 3y ago
Proofreading is enormously expensive in time and, as a spouse, goodwill. More so if you have to proofread their colleagues papers as well, where the level of English can vary enormously. Perhaps it's time to reimagine the scientific paper in a more terse format with more declarative statements and data rather than the mini-novel. That would make machine translation more tractable and may even lead to better tools to check assertions and search related work.
- tetris11 3y ago
  Nature is really good at giving you a spec with examples and guidelines you need to adhere to
  - JadeNB 3y ago
    For a moment I didn't parse that as the name of a journal, but as a statement about the natural world, and it sounded wise but I couldn't figure out what it meant.
    - xxs 3y ago
      It should have an article (the) in such a case.
      - JadeNB 3y ago
        > It should have an article (the) in such a case. I'm not quite sure what you mean. tetris11's meaning is clear, and I was just making a whimsical observation, but I think it is possible (though clearly wrong in context) to parse: > Nature is really good at giving you a spec with examples and guidelines you need to adhere to as telling you something about the behavior of nature, analogous to "nature does nothing in vain" (Google's first auto-complete suggestion when I asked it for a sample sentence).
      - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
        Nature is really good at giving you a spec with examples and guidelines you need to adhere to. The italics matter. But neither case, the magazine or actual nature, should have the definite article.
boredumb 3y ago
Non-fluent lisp programmers work much harder just to keep up (with work on a program written in lisp)
adam_arthur 3y ago
It will be interesting to see what the language space looks like 100-200 years from now. Almost certainly the world will converge onto fewer and fewer languages, likely just one being commonly used in the end. Sad to lose the edge that language gives to cultural uniqueness, but hard to argue the costs of communication barriers are worth it. Another way it could go is for widely available real time translating tools. The technology is already pretty much there... but this still adds overhead to communication
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  > Another way it could go is for widely available real time translating tools. The technology is already pretty much there... but this still adds overhead to communication I could see something like Apple Airpods (or any smart headphone equivalent) automatically detecting language and translating in real time. That would be a pretty minimal overhead.
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  I think the opposite. One thing is that we probably won't lose any languages anymore. There will be plenty of books, texts and videos in the Internet, so everyone who will want to learn his mother language, can do it. Another thing is that even today AI is perfectly able to translate both text and voice. And it's not going to get any worse with time. So even if yesterday you were forced to learn English to keep up with recent Rust developments, today you can use AI to translate articles. Popular websites like stackoverflow are lagging behind, but it's only a matter of time before they'll add universal translator and enable everyone to interact with everyone else with their preferred language.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    >One thing is that we probably won't lose any languages anymore. There will be plenty of books, texts and videos in the Internet, so everyone who will want to learn his mother language, can do it. People don't learn their mother tongues from books, they learn it from their parents. Languages begin to die out not when people can no longer learn them, but when their native speakers cease to find it useful, because a larger culture has assimilated them and they get more out of using the majority language instead. Consider a future when a Spaniard spends most of their day talking in English to people online, and everyone else they talk to also does the same. There's an inflection point at which everyone just decides to speak in English all the time.
shagmin 3y ago
The article focuses on the writing, not so much the actual understanding. I've wondered if there's actually an advantage in understanding when reading English documentation, sources, etc., in that some native English speaker might be inclined to lazily learn something by just memorizing key points as the words are written and such whereas a non-fluent English speaker would have to mentally translate ideas into their native language and then memorize that mental translation. It's an extra muscle that gets exercised.
zer8k 3y ago
I don't see a problem with this. The lingua franca is English. Prior to that it was Latin. In science you're held to a higher standard and this is a small issue. > Compared to a fellow PhD student who happens to be a native English speaker, you’ll need 91% more time to read a paper in English. This equates to an additional three weeks per year for reading the same number of papers. > The next big hurdle comes when trying to publish your own paper in English. > First, you’ll need 51% more time to write the paper. Then you’ll likely need someone to proofread your text, such as a professional editor. This is non-sense and is given without a single source other than a study likely tailor made for this result. I know plenty of ESL scientists and this is the least of their concern.
nocoiner 3y ago
100 or so years ago, couldn’t this article have been written about the use of German in science papers? I’m really not sure that this is a problem per se, but rather just a dynamic that is going to exert itself in any type of worldwide communication. Shall we change the international language of aviation from English to Chinese because there’s a greater number of native Chinese speakers? Doesn’t seem very sensible to me. I grant that it’s incredibly easy for me to sound dismissive of this issue as a native English speaker, but I don’t think throwing AI-as-a-buzzword at the problem is much of a solution. That said, I did really like this potential solutions described by the article; sounds like a great tactic not only to address this issue, but to build relationships and cross-border research networks. “Conference organisers also have myriad opportunities to support non-native English-speaking participants. For example, last year’s Animal Behaviour Society conference incorporated a multilingual buddy program to improve inclusivity.”
- jostiniane 3y ago
  Such a stange response to a valid issue. This is leaving brilliant minds behind for loosing the lottery of not being born in a native English speaking land. I have no idea why this comment is showing up in top.. The struggle is real, while I was in academia, I got to know brilliant people who didn't make it far enough because they had it in their own native language for too long and it became too late to invest a year or so working on their English..
- vpastore 3y ago
  [dead]
cat_plus_plus 3y ago
Scientists should love standards and there is no more important standard for advancement of science than all scientists in the world being fluent in a single language. So far, it looks like it's going to be English. But if, after generation or two, it ends up being Spanish or Mandarin, I am fine with that. For the same reason, I am willing to use metric units in scientific matters. Or if at some point computer real time verbal and written translation between languages and measuring units is truly flawless, we have sidestepped the entire problem. But any solution that calls for fragmentation of human knowledge by having different papers and different conferences using different languages is tribal, not scientific. That is not to say that learning multiple languages is bad. It's just cultural, not scientific. With any luck, science will one day give us enough leisure that we have more time for culture.
pvaldes 3y ago
If you have an urgent problem, It does not matter in what language will be solved
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
fomine3 3y ago
I disappointed that many HN commenters don't understand their privilege. I don't argue that any language other than English should be lingua franca, but people good at English thanks to their born environment should aware that there are many people who learn hard to catch up (and hardly catch up as native level).

59 points by amadeuspagel 3y ago

Whose problem is this?

I wonder if they will keep printing rubbish like this when the language of science becomes Chinese, which is not too far off.

cscurmudgeon 3y ago
At the point you will see harmony championed over diversity.
DFHippie 3y ago
Why is it rubbish? It is useful for there to be some lingua franca. There are arguments for why English is a good candidate: - already widely spoken - economically important - simple word morphology - no grammatical gender - an alphabetic writing system that is relatively easy to learn There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns In any case, it's what we've got. But it is also true that communicating professionally in a language you learned for that purpose imposes a burden that native speakers don't face. If you find it boring to read attempts to quantify this, maybe this article isn't for you.
- JadeNB 3y ago
  Thanks for this considered response! > obligatory gender in animate pronouns While it's just one in a long list of things, I'll point out that singular "they" is available (and has a long history) for people wishing to use non-gendered, animate pronouns. (I have also heard "it", but, while everyone's mileage will differ, my brain has a much harder time getting over the difficulty with reading "it" as animate than it does the difficulty with reading "they" as singular.)
- zer8k 3y ago
  > There are reasons why it is a bad candidate: - terrible spelling for an alphabetic writing system - definite articles, which confuse speakers of languages which lack them - arguable unnecessary tense and aspect distinctions - obligatory gender in animate pronouns The only way to fix this is to make the lingua franca a constructed language. I'm not exactly against the idea of Esperanto being the lowest common denominator. However, there's this implication in your post and the article that English being the wrong language is some thinly veiled imperialism, racism, or something. Science is not that way. If there was an easier language to communicate to an audience with they'd use that. The "base" language of English is far, far simpler than other languages. Gendered pronouns are available in almost every language and English is one of the only languages where you can replace them with non-gendered pronouns if you so choose. In fact, I wrote this entire post without using any gendered language. This would be impossible in nearly any other widely spoken language. It would be easier if the frothing at the mouth pro-DEI-at-all-costs people would just say what they mean. Then the argument could be addressed correctly - English replaced Latin because it was easier and evolving. Chinese is the only language that would replace it based on paper-origin/language ratio and Chinese is an order of magnitude or more complicated. Even just speaking about the alphabet it's something like 100x larger.
  - nradov 3y ago
    Esperanto is mostly based on Indo-European group languages. Compared to English, Esperanto is only marginally easier to learn for people who grew up communicating in languages from other groups like Arabic or Chinese. If we wanted a more neutral language ideally suited to scientific discourse then Lojban would be the "logical" choice. But of course in the real world it's totally impractical. https://mw.lojban.org/ https://mw.lojban.org/
bagacrap 3y ago
Why do you think this? There are vastly more English speakers than Mandarin worldwide [1] and China is now only the second most populous country, overtaken by India. English is an official language of India and while not pervasively spoken overall, is pervasively spoken by the educated classes. I think Mandarin will have a hard time increasing its sphere of influence, despite what cyberpunk authors may have predicted 30 years ago. [1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#people-and-society https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#peop...
- veave 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ihateolives 3y ago
    [citation needed]
  - sonicshadow 3y ago
    [flagged]
- dirtyid 3y ago
  TLDR is PRC has enough state capacity to produce and harness enough scientific talent to compete with global English in science, but likely not to replace it. PRC academic system that heavily focuses on science is spitting out educated classes that can in aggregate rival the size (and increasingly quality) of the English tertiary network. The current STEM production rate is ~5M or OECD combined. People mocked at PRC academic paper mills a few years ago, but now PRC talent is topping science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), that's the natural outcome of exploiting talent at PRC scale. Project trend to 2050 (past 26 years of new births already locked in) and PRC can feasibly hammer out 100M+ talent in just STEM, and most importantly, increasingly be able to retain talent without the best being brain drained. Effect going forward is that PRC is going to snowball the generation of high impact scientific research and it will increasingly be written in mandarin - PRC removed mandatory English education. PRC scientific base will likely be large enough to rival English RoW, the dynamic will be more the PRC science sphere will be less inclined to integrate with the Anglo sphere. Especially if translation tech improves. IMO the mandarin science ecosystem will be fine competing if not leading in her own bubble. If anything, the PRC might prefer the gatekeeping science behind language as a competitive advantage. Global science will splinter and mandarin science will be it's own pole. Shortcoming of India elite demographic dividend argument is, western academic institutes have limited capacity to absorb Indian talent, who let’s be frank, is replacing current cohort or PRC talent due to geopolitics which will make Indian brain drain problem worse and PRC talent retention better. English proficiency among brain drained elites will make spinning up indigenous Indian S&T at scale difficult, which India herself has a poor track record of exploiting. That can change with time obviously, but IMO there's something systemic happening with Indian diaspora doing well abroad for much longer than PRC diaspora but not meaningfully converting that into success for their birth country. Without India actually raising the ceiling for western academic ecosystem, you're looking at anglo and mandarin ecosystems competing closely. Unless anglos massively boost skill immigration, but that's politically difficult and the opposite is just as likely.
zer8k 3y ago
I agree with the actual point you're making. This is a thinly veiled DEI opinion article.
wl 3y ago
I'm skeptical that Chinese will ever become the international language of science as long as Hanzi is the dominant script used to write it.
- ihateolives 3y ago
  Yup, people vastly understimate the effort needed to learn Mandarin. It's not in the same ballpark by far with Spanish, French of even Russian or Greek.
nradov 3y ago
China is most likely to suffer a severe economic and societal collapse due to their demographic problems within a couple decades. At that point their scientific productivity will also decline. There is no scenario in which Chinese becomes the dominant written language for scientific discourse. https://youtu.be/kBMSZ7v3KxQ https://youtu.be/kBMSZ7v3KxQ
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
This shit only comes out in low-risk situations. If Chinese was becoming standard, they'd go back to talking about rape culture in dog parks or whatever. It's why Queer Theory is so insane - very very low stakes. (If you don't believe me, read some Gayle Rubin or the less mainstream Foucault stuff).
- Claude_Shannon 3y ago
  I don't understand what is the reason for this unrelated rant.

gemanor 3y ago

It's also interesting to see the affection of learning English in school as a child in this research. In Israel (where I live), there is a big argument lately on the importance of learning English as part of the mandatory school materials.

bagacrap 3y ago
I'm surprised it's not already taught in school. Even in US public schools, foreign languages are taught (poorly), most often Spanish.
- cuttysnark 3y ago
  > are taught (poorly) Anecdotal. Here's another: my language teachers from year 3-12 were above average if anything—most of my peers were at least conversational in Spanish (or their selected language) by high school. At the time, the school system offered Spanish, French, German and Latin. Those who took Latin almost always had medical school ambitions. I asked.
commandlinefan 3y ago
When I lived in Japan in the early 90's, English was a mandatory subject for school children even as early as elementary school. As far as I could tell, it was a waste of time - the kids hated studying it and thought it was a huge waste of their time.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  That's because any subject can be made boring and not that many people can make learning at least pleasant, if not fun.

bagacrap 3y ago

The article gives some blanket stats regarding the extra effort to be a non native English speaker, but they use a definition of native that excludes most of India. Even if it is not their first language, Indians have a clear advantage over, say, Chinese, in terms of typical English fluency. There's no way the "91% more time to read papers" figure applies equally to the median Chinese and median Indian scientist. That said, this article and paper don't really seem to provide any kind of solution, they just identify a problem. I don't really see what the scientific community can do about it? Aside from inventing a babel fish, this seems like a problem for education ministers around the globe.

anovikov 3y ago
[flagged]
- JadeNB 3y ago
  I am a white, male, native English speaker. I benefit greatly from the fact that the scientific community of which I am a part was mostly set up by, and continues to operate for the benefit of, people like me. I do not feel, nor did this article make me feel, that I am bad for possessing these qualities; but I would feel bad if I tried to stick my head in the sand and not hear it when someone else told me about these issues. It's not my responsibility to solve all the problems caused for people not like me in a world that is set up for people like me, but I'm certainly not too fragile to at least be aware of them.
  - bannedbybros 3y ago
    [dead]
  - NoRelToEmber 3y ago
    > a world that is set up for people like me The anglosphere, not the world. I assure you there are many parts of the world not set up for people like you. I live in one of them. We don't feel guilty about building our corner of the world for our own benefit. But we also don't see our home country as a mere economic platform open for everyone.

tekla 3y ago

English is currently more or less the global language for most things international. The solution is to push even more English education if international scientists want to keep up. I would have the exact same opinion if Chinese was doing the same.

zubiaur 3y ago
100%. I'm very grateful for my family providing me with a foreign language education, particularly English. It's not obvious to me that Chinese is going to become the next global language, although if it were, I would provide my children with the means to learn it. I must say though, that at least when it comes to medical journal articles, some native chinese sources I've found were better written. Less verbose, flowery, jargony. Much more concise. Curious to know if this applies to other fields too.
jostiniane 3y ago
it's the cycle of civilizations and English got a turn, I agree that's the way. But the issue for most places is the fear to loose their language and identity slowly.. Pushing their own language in schools and universities is a way to keep it alive but does sacrifice people and leave them behind.. I come from a place where English is the third language and I can see the pain of brilliant people left behind because of that.

smackay 3y ago

Proofreading is enormously expensive in time and, as a spouse, goodwill. More so if you have to proofread their colleagues papers as well, where the level of English can vary enormously. Perhaps it's time to reimagine the scientific paper in a more terse format with more declarative statements and data rather than the mini-novel. That would make machine translation more tractable and may even lead to better tools to check assertions and search related work.

tetris11 3y ago
Nature is really good at giving you a spec with examples and guidelines you need to adhere to
- JadeNB 3y ago
  For a moment I didn't parse that as the name of a journal, but as a statement about the natural world, and it sounded wise but I couldn't figure out what it meant.
  - xxs 3y ago
    It should have an article (the) in such a case.
    - JadeNB 3y ago
      > It should have an article (the) in such a case. I'm not quite sure what you mean. tetris11's meaning is clear, and I was just making a whimsical observation, but I think it is possible (though clearly wrong in context) to parse: > Nature is really good at giving you a spec with examples and guidelines you need to adhere to as telling you something about the behavior of nature, analogous to "nature does nothing in vain" (Google's first auto-complete suggestion when I asked it for a sample sentence).
    - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
      Nature is really good at giving you a spec with examples and guidelines you need to adhere to. The italics matter. But neither case, the magazine or actual nature, should have the definite article.

boredumb 3y ago

Non-fluent lisp programmers work much harder just to keep up (with work on a program written in lisp)

adam_arthur 3y ago

It will be interesting to see what the language space looks like 100-200 years from now. Almost certainly the world will converge onto fewer and fewer languages, likely just one being commonly used in the end. Sad to lose the edge that language gives to cultural uniqueness, but hard to argue the costs of communication barriers are worth it. Another way it could go is for widely available real time translating tools. The technology is already pretty much there... but this still adds overhead to communication

throwaway894345 3y ago
> Another way it could go is for widely available real time translating tools. The technology is already pretty much there... but this still adds overhead to communication I could see something like Apple Airpods (or any smart headphone equivalent) automatically detecting language and translating in real time. That would be a pretty minimal overhead.
vbezhenar 3y ago
I think the opposite. One thing is that we probably won't lose any languages anymore. There will be plenty of books, texts and videos in the Internet, so everyone who will want to learn his mother language, can do it. Another thing is that even today AI is perfectly able to translate both text and voice. And it's not going to get any worse with time. So even if yesterday you were forced to learn English to keep up with recent Rust developments, today you can use AI to translate articles. Popular websites like stackoverflow are lagging behind, but it's only a matter of time before they'll add universal translator and enable everyone to interact with everyone else with their preferred language.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  >One thing is that we probably won't lose any languages anymore. There will be plenty of books, texts and videos in the Internet, so everyone who will want to learn his mother language, can do it. People don't learn their mother tongues from books, they learn it from their parents. Languages begin to die out not when people can no longer learn them, but when their native speakers cease to find it useful, because a larger culture has assimilated them and they get more out of using the majority language instead. Consider a future when a Spaniard spends most of their day talking in English to people online, and everyone else they talk to also does the same. There's an inflection point at which everyone just decides to speak in English all the time.

shagmin 3y ago

The article focuses on the writing, not so much the actual understanding. I've wondered if there's actually an advantage in understanding when reading English documentation, sources, etc., in that some native English speaker might be inclined to lazily learn something by just memorizing key points as the words are written and such whereas a non-fluent English speaker would have to mentally translate ideas into their native language and then memorize that mental translation. It's an extra muscle that gets exercised.

zer8k 3y ago

I don't see a problem with this. The lingua franca is English. Prior to that it was Latin. In science you're held to a higher standard and this is a small issue. > Compared to a fellow PhD student who happens to be a native English speaker, you’ll need 91% more time to read a paper in English. This equates to an additional three weeks per year for reading the same number of papers. > The next big hurdle comes when trying to publish your own paper in English. > First, you’ll need 51% more time to write the paper. Then you’ll likely need someone to proofread your text, such as a professional editor. This is non-sense and is given without a single source other than a study likely tailor made for this result. I know plenty of ESL scientists and this is the least of their concern.

nocoiner 3y ago

100 or so years ago, couldn’t this article have been written about the use of German in science papers? I’m really not sure that this is a problem per se, but rather just a dynamic that is going to exert itself in any type of worldwide communication. Shall we change the international language of aviation from English to Chinese because there’s a greater number of native Chinese speakers? Doesn’t seem very sensible to me. I grant that it’s incredibly easy for me to sound dismissive of this issue as a native English speaker, but I don’t think throwing AI-as-a-buzzword at the problem is much of a solution. That said, I did really like this potential solutions described by the article; sounds like a great tactic not only to address this issue, but to build relationships and cross-border research networks. “Conference organisers also have myriad opportunities to support non-native English-speaking participants. For example, last year’s Animal Behaviour Society conference incorporated a multilingual buddy program to improve inclusivity.”

jostiniane 3y ago
Such a stange response to a valid issue. This is leaving brilliant minds behind for loosing the lottery of not being born in a native English speaking land. I have no idea why this comment is showing up in top.. The struggle is real, while I was in academia, I got to know brilliant people who didn't make it far enough because they had it in their own native language for too long and it became too late to invest a year or so working on their English..
vpastore 3y ago
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cat_plus_plus 3y ago

Scientists should love standards and there is no more important standard for advancement of science than all scientists in the world being fluent in a single language. So far, it looks like it's going to be English. But if, after generation or two, it ends up being Spanish or Mandarin, I am fine with that. For the same reason, I am willing to use metric units in scientific matters. Or if at some point computer real time verbal and written translation between languages and measuring units is truly flawless, we have sidestepped the entire problem. But any solution that calls for fragmentation of human knowledge by having different papers and different conferences using different languages is tribal, not scientific. That is not to say that learning multiple languages is bad. It's just cultural, not scientific. With any luck, science will one day give us enough leisure that we have more time for culture.

pvaldes 3y ago

If you have an urgent problem, It does not matter in what language will be solved

deleted 3y ago

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fomine3 3y ago

I disappointed that many HN commenters don't understand their privilege. I don't argue that any language other than English should be lingua franca, but people good at English thanks to their born environment should aware that there are many people who learn hard to catch up (and hardly catch up as native level).