5 ms·

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 In

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.
    - JadeNB 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. My phrasing was sloppy. I meant the scientific world in which I operate, not the entire scientific world, and certainly not the literal entire globe. > 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. I'm not sure if that's a general statement of fact or a response to something I said, but, if I appeared to imply that you should feel guilty or that your home country should be a mere economic platform, then I did not mean to do so, and I apologize.
      - NoRelToEmber 3y ago
        You have nothing to apologize for, at least not to me. I just wanted to highlight what usually gets forgotten in these self-flagellating discussions - people like me who learn English as a second language to participate in the anglosphere have countries of our own, where our culture and language is the norm. English grants us access to an additional world. That we have to do the bare minimum and learn English to access the anglosphere (or global scientific publishing, where if it wasn't English then it would be French or Latin or some other common language, and the issues would be the same) is not something you should spend an ounce of guilt, or even limited awareness, on. And it is downright perverse that the fantastic scientific accomplishments, that drew the global scientific community to learn English to access them, get re-cast as "the world built for you", as some kind of unearned privilege.
- thebooktocome 3y ago
  The article does suggest two “fixes” and none of them involve your conspiracy theory about leftists. * Journals could provide more editing support, possibly with AI translation tools. * Journals could allow multilingual submissions.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    >* Journals could allow multilingual submissions. That doesn't really fix anything. If you submit in an unpopular language you're willingly limiting the reach your paper is going to get. That's not a problem just for the researcher, but also for the community at large.
    - bannedbybros 3y ago
      [dead]
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    Multilingual submissions is a terrible idea. Who's going to read my ML paper in Nahuatl? Just learn English, or if you're in China, Mandarin.
    - pvaldes 3y ago
      To translate literature is the job of a professional translator or a machine. Period. The time of an expert is too much expensive to spent it on that, so this is an extremely dumb tradition. In fact is so dumb that research is the only part of literature where the author is required to write also the translated edition. Just imagine how much damage that would do to the literature if we would apply that rule to every piece of poetry or every written novel, and how many interesting authors and books we would lose. Do you imagine how much JK Rowling would struggle writing Harry Potter in Spanish, and how much extra time and effort would need to put on it? This is exactly the same (except that you give your novel for free instead to became rich).
    - pvaldes 3y ago
      > Who's going to read my ML paper in Nahuatl? If you provide a clever solution for climate change on it, every-f*ng-body. Abstracts were created exactly for this. And if your intended audience is mostly composed of Nahuatl speakers or your theme is about this group, you should positively consider to write it on this language. Not all science papers are mean to interest everybody in the planet. There are lots and lots of specialized niches.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  I suspect that was the subtext too, but I do think that we native English speakers could meet our foreign colleagues halfway and at least spend some time trying to learn foreign languages if for no other reason than to sympathize with the challenges of context switching like that.
JadeNB 3y ago
> There's no way the "91% more time to read papers" figure applies equally to the median Chinese and median Indian scientist. I'm also kind of shocked at the idea that language barriers cause greater barriers to reading a paper (91% time increase) than to writing one (51%) in a non-native language. > 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? Guessing at the authors' motivations—for me, although it's obvious in retrospect, if you had asked me yesterday "what are some barriers to non-native speakers of English entering the sciences?", I wouldn't necessarily have thought of the extra time to read and write papers, and just this spreading of awareness is a reasonable end in itself. Beyond that, I think part of the point is to de-externalize the cost. Currently, native English speakers bear, or at least know that they are bearing, little to none of the cost of the difficulty others have accessing their work, and I think the hope is to force people to think consciously about what they could do. For example, in math, at least, there are journals and series that publish translations of non-English works into English, but I know of few that work the other way; that could be a major good, even if it is a daunting undertaking. If that's too much—as it surely is as an immediate solution—one thing that occurs to me is that perhaps there could be some sort of training for scientific writers in how to write more accessible English—where jargon is OK (since it's to be read by specialists), but "advanced" English constructs should be avoided when possible. tetris11 mentions elsethread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36787311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36787311) that Nature apparently does something like this.
- CrazyStat 3y ago
  > I'm also kind of shocked at the idea that language barriers cause greater barriers to reading a paper (91% time increase) than to writing one (51%) in a non-native language. This actually makes sense to me. Reading a paper takes time on the scale of hours, and having to stop to parse difficult sentences or look up unfamiliar words can add to that substantially. Writing a paper takes time on the scale of weeks to months, and there's a lot that goes into it other than putting words down on paper. Making figures, figuring out how to argue a certain point, thinking about what examples to provide to best illustrate what you're trying to get across--these are big parts of the writing process that are more or less language agnostic in the sense that the time-intensive part can be carried out in the writer's native language and the result translated into English. If I were to try to read a paper in my field in Russian (a language I have a decent but far from fluent grasp on, and I don't know the jargon of my field) I would expect it to take at least twice as long as reading it in English. Translating one of my papers into Russian would take a long time, but it would not double the total time spent on writing the paper.
mypastself 3y ago
They do offer solutions near the end of the article, but they seem counterproductive. E.g. the preprint server that allows alternate languages states that: > The reliance on English language publications to communicate scientific findings is clearly a hindrance to the open sharing of scientific knowledge But wouldn’t the hindrance be much stronger if you’re writing a paper exclusively in a language like Portuguese instead of English?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tekla 3y ago
  Yes. The proposed solution seems to be, lets make it harder for everyone to read anything. Everyone needs to know the top 10 languages instead of settling on the one most people are already using.
  - thebooktocome 3y ago
    “The one most people are already using” is Mandarin, followed by Spanish, then followed by English.
    - tekla 3y ago
      The one most people are already using in international science. Also if you're going to try dunking on me, at least get it right, English is the most spoken language in the world https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
      - throwaway894345 3y ago
        I think he's listing the most widely spoken native language which confused me as well since English is the most widely spoken language.
RajT88 3y ago
Indeed. Former British colonies as a whole have good representation in STEM for this reason. (Where I work, there's a lot of Nigerians as well as Indians)
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
That said, this article and paper don't really seem to provide any kind of solution, they just identify a problem. As a non-native English speaking scientist, I don't think this is a problem that can or should be "solved" (as by, I don't know, switching to Esperanto or something like that); but awareness is important. For example, reviewers not being jerks about papers by non-native speakers would already be helpful. In this sense, I think articles like this are useful because many native speakers greatly underestimate the extra effort required. Another example: in my particular research community, there was discussion about forbidding ChatGPT as a paper writing assistant. But every person I saw taking that position was a native English speaker. No non-native would ever defend that, because for us it's obvious that it's probably the single best technological advance of all time to bridge the paper writing gap. Native speakers were all fussed about writing being "fake", soulless, etc. whereas the main worry of many non-native is being able to express their ideas in a fluent enough form to not cause the paper to be rejected.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  > single best technological advance of all time to bridge the paper writing gap This is not a point that's come up in my native-English-speaking bubble. Thanks for pointing this out!
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Interesting. How do you use chatgpt for this? Do you give it some text and ask it to correct grammar?
  - im_dario 3y ago
    Just asking ChatGPT to proofread a text is enough. I’ve used for different languages and native speakers didn’t tell it was written by a non-native neither an IA.
    - bagacrap 3y ago
      I have used it for different languages, and native speakers could not tell that it was written by a non-native or an AI. --- Pretty sure I would recognize this sentence as fishy because no one would use non-native like that. But this probably would indeed be helpful and seemingly valid to use this to improve papers. Although it did alright on this one sentence, I'd still be worried that it would change the meaning of something somewhere that a less fluent speaker wouldn't notice.

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.
  - JadeNB 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. My phrasing was sloppy. I meant the scientific world in which I operate, not the entire scientific world, and certainly not the literal entire globe. > 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. I'm not sure if that's a general statement of fact or a response to something I said, but, if I appeared to imply that you should feel guilty or that your home country should be a mere economic platform, then I did not mean to do so, and I apologize.
    - NoRelToEmber 3y ago
      You have nothing to apologize for, at least not to me. I just wanted to highlight what usually gets forgotten in these self-flagellating discussions - people like me who learn English as a second language to participate in the anglosphere have countries of our own, where our culture and language is the norm. English grants us access to an additional world. That we have to do the bare minimum and learn English to access the anglosphere (or global scientific publishing, where if it wasn't English then it would be French or Latin or some other common language, and the issues would be the same) is not something you should spend an ounce of guilt, or even limited awareness, on. And it is downright perverse that the fantastic scientific accomplishments, that drew the global scientific community to learn English to access them, get re-cast as "the world built for you", as some kind of unearned privilege.
thebooktocome 3y ago
The article does suggest two “fixes” and none of them involve your conspiracy theory about leftists. * Journals could provide more editing support, possibly with AI translation tools. * Journals could allow multilingual submissions.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  >* Journals could allow multilingual submissions. That doesn't really fix anything. If you submit in an unpopular language you're willingly limiting the reach your paper is going to get. That's not a problem just for the researcher, but also for the community at large.
  - bannedbybros 3y ago
    [dead]
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  Multilingual submissions is a terrible idea. Who's going to read my ML paper in Nahuatl? Just learn English, or if you're in China, Mandarin.
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    To translate literature is the job of a professional translator or a machine. Period. The time of an expert is too much expensive to spent it on that, so this is an extremely dumb tradition. In fact is so dumb that research is the only part of literature where the author is required to write also the translated edition. Just imagine how much damage that would do to the literature if we would apply that rule to every piece of poetry or every written novel, and how many interesting authors and books we would lose. Do you imagine how much JK Rowling would struggle writing Harry Potter in Spanish, and how much extra time and effort would need to put on it? This is exactly the same (except that you give your novel for free instead to became rich).
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    > Who's going to read my ML paper in Nahuatl? If you provide a clever solution for climate change on it, every-f*ng-body. Abstracts were created exactly for this. And if your intended audience is mostly composed of Nahuatl speakers or your theme is about this group, you should positively consider to write it on this language. Not all science papers are mean to interest everybody in the planet. There are lots and lots of specialized niches.
commandlinefan 3y ago
I suspect that was the subtext too, but I do think that we native English speakers could meet our foreign colleagues halfway and at least spend some time trying to learn foreign languages if for no other reason than to sympathize with the challenges of context switching like that.

JadeNB 3y ago

> There's no way the "91% more time to read papers" figure applies equally to the median Chinese and median Indian scientist. I'm also kind of shocked at the idea that language barriers cause greater barriers to reading a paper (91% time increase) than to writing one (51%) in a non-native language. > 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? Guessing at the authors' motivations—for me, although it's obvious in retrospect, if you had asked me yesterday "what are some barriers to non-native speakers of English entering the sciences?", I wouldn't necessarily have thought of the extra time to read and write papers, and just this spreading of awareness is a reasonable end in itself. Beyond that, I think part of the point is to de-externalize the cost. Currently, native English speakers bear, or at least know that they are bearing, little to none of the cost of the difficulty others have accessing their work, and I think the hope is to force people to think consciously about what they could do. For example, in math, at least, there are journals and series that publish translations of non-English works into English, but I know of few that work the other way; that could be a major good, even if it is a daunting undertaking. If that's too much—as it surely is as an immediate solution—one thing that occurs to me is that perhaps there could be some sort of training for scientific writers in how to write more accessible English—where jargon is OK (since it's to be read by specialists), but "advanced" English constructs should be avoided when possible. tetris11 mentions elsethread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36787311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36787311) that Nature apparently does something like this.

CrazyStat 3y ago
> I'm also kind of shocked at the idea that language barriers cause greater barriers to reading a paper (91% time increase) than to writing one (51%) in a non-native language. This actually makes sense to me. Reading a paper takes time on the scale of hours, and having to stop to parse difficult sentences or look up unfamiliar words can add to that substantially. Writing a paper takes time on the scale of weeks to months, and there's a lot that goes into it other than putting words down on paper. Making figures, figuring out how to argue a certain point, thinking about what examples to provide to best illustrate what you're trying to get across--these are big parts of the writing process that are more or less language agnostic in the sense that the time-intensive part can be carried out in the writer's native language and the result translated into English. If I were to try to read a paper in my field in Russian (a language I have a decent but far from fluent grasp on, and I don't know the jargon of my field) I would expect it to take at least twice as long as reading it in English. Translating one of my papers into Russian would take a long time, but it would not double the total time spent on writing the paper.

mypastself 3y ago

They do offer solutions near the end of the article, but they seem counterproductive. E.g. the preprint server that allows alternate languages states that: > The reliance on English language publications to communicate scientific findings is clearly a hindrance to the open sharing of scientific knowledge But wouldn’t the hindrance be much stronger if you’re writing a paper exclusively in a language like Portuguese instead of English?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tekla 3y ago
Yes. The proposed solution seems to be, lets make it harder for everyone to read anything. Everyone needs to know the top 10 languages instead of settling on the one most people are already using.
- thebooktocome 3y ago
  “The one most people are already using” is Mandarin, followed by Spanish, then followed by English.
  - tekla 3y ago
    The one most people are already using in international science. Also if you're going to try dunking on me, at least get it right, English is the most spoken language in the world https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
    - throwaway894345 3y ago
      I think he's listing the most widely spoken native language which confused me as well since English is the most widely spoken language.

RajT88 3y ago

Indeed. Former British colonies as a whole have good representation in STEM for this reason. (Where I work, there's a lot of Nigerians as well as Indians)

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

That said, this article and paper don't really seem to provide any kind of solution, they just identify a problem. As a non-native English speaking scientist, I don't think this is a problem that can or should be "solved" (as by, I don't know, switching to Esperanto or something like that); but awareness is important. For example, reviewers not being jerks about papers by non-native speakers would already be helpful. In this sense, I think articles like this are useful because many native speakers greatly underestimate the extra effort required. Another example: in my particular research community, there was discussion about forbidding ChatGPT as a paper writing assistant. But every person I saw taking that position was a native English speaker. No non-native would ever defend that, because for us it's obvious that it's probably the single best technological advance of all time to bridge the paper writing gap. Native speakers were all fussed about writing being "fake", soulless, etc. whereas the main worry of many non-native is being able to express their ideas in a fluent enough form to not cause the paper to be rejected.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
> single best technological advance of all time to bridge the paper writing gap This is not a point that's come up in my native-English-speaking bubble. Thanks for pointing this out!
bagacrap 3y ago
Interesting. How do you use chatgpt for this? Do you give it some text and ask it to correct grammar?
- im_dario 3y ago
  Just asking ChatGPT to proofread a text is enough. I’ve used for different languages and native speakers didn’t tell it was written by a non-native neither an IA.
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    I have used it for different languages, and native speakers could not tell that it was written by a non-native or an AI. --- Pretty sure I would recognize this sentence as fishy because no one would use non-native like that. But this probably would indeed be helpful and seemingly valid to use this to improve papers. Although it did alright on this one sentence, I'd still be worried that it would change the meaning of something somewhere that a less fluent speaker wouldn't notice.