6 ms·

The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

22 points by isingle 3y ago

somat 3y ago
Conversely there is the advantage of the narrow waist. the state where everything has to fit in the same container. The biggest example of this is the internet, where we have many types of cable to carry information, and many applications that want to talk to each other, but everything speaks IP. see also: containerized shipping, nema motor mounts. So true, it is hard if english is not your first language, but there is this huge advantage to having a single common language that everyone speaks. today it is english, before that french, and before that latin.
- jbm 3y ago
  Broken English in scientific papers are, if anything, a problem. I have a brother-in-law who doesn't speak English, but gets his papers translated into English to publish. There is no way for him to really know if they precise, accurate, and correct; as the person who knows his own research the best, he simply cannot review the paper. As it might be possible for us to eventually improve our machine translation, it might be more valuable to keep his papers in Japanese.
  - nmstoker 3y ago
    This is a fine example, because the text has a few grammatical errors but they do not impair intelligibility so shouldn't matter. The challenge comes where errors may have impacted intelligibility or worse still changed their meaning. This kind of misunderstanding is common and I'm not surprised it needs extra effort - I had a major disruption this week when an ESL coworker misunderstood the meaning of a particular ambiguous word in a project even though this exact difficulty was anticipated and time was spent up front to clarify it.
tombert 3y ago
I think it's extremely unfair how much of an advantage us native anglophones have in the scientific realm. Doing anything interesting enough to get published is hard enough as it is, and I have to assume that it's substantially harder for people who are also fighting a language barrier as well. A part of me wants something like Esperanto to take over this space.
- dpc050505 3y ago
  Esperanto just creates the same language barrier for everyone. English is an easy language to learn. I'm ESL and it's no big deal.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    There’s probably a distinction between speaking/writing as a fluent and idiomatically interesting well-versed native writer and competent prose for a paper—which is fine for most purposes; an editor will fix you up. Most native speakers aren’t great writers either. Trust me. It’s a lot of my job these days.
  - tombert 3y ago
    > Esperanto just creates the same language barrier for everyone. Yes, that's kind of what I was getting at; I think everyone should go through the same hurdles instead of creating a huge advantage for about ~400 million people while the remaining 7.6 billion people have to do extra work. If we chose a language that isn't really spoken natively, then in theory we could create a system that doesn't give an inherent advantage to any one group. Obviously that can't be strictly true in practice; a language like Esperanto would give advantages to people more used to European languages, and other conlangs or abandoned languages would have other issues. > English is an easy language to learn. I'm ESL and it's no big deal. Is that true? I've always heard that English is a hard language to learn.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      No one cares about abstract let’s make everything equally hard fairness And, as you say, Esperanto is still Indo-European and probably Romance so why not just go back to using Latin or French.
      - tombert 3y ago
        That's fair! I was just using Esperanto as an example; I'm not opposed to going back to Latin.
ghaff 3y ago
There have been different language barriers in the past—most notably Latin which wasn’t used natively by pretty much any speakers after a point and then German in some fields and French in European courts. But yeah, English has become pretty much the standard language for many purposes and if you didn’t learn it as a native it’s something you have to learn as a non-native for many purposes.
irrational 3y ago
>“Non-native English speakers constitute almost 95% of the world’s population,” Amano says. “If we don’t support those 95%, I’m sure we can’t solve many global challenges.” Is 95% an accurate number? What percentage are not native speakers, but have near native fluency? I've been to Iceland and Denmark and everyone I spoke to in those places could speak English with near native fluency. I remember meeting one guy in a tiny village in northern Iceland. He sounded like a completely native American English speaker. It turned out that he had never even left his village to travel to Reykjavik, but still had me fooled into thinking that surely he had spent significant amount of time in America.
- bitcuration 3y ago
  Norse people are pretty amazing when it comes to English speaking, next comes German and Dutch. It seems EU people are generally potent in multilingual. Granted English may be like a dialect to them.
- unmole 3y ago
  Iceland and Denmark combined have a population of ~6 million. My hometown has almost twice as many people.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  > Is 95% an accurate number? What percentage are not native speakers, but have near native fluency? You are right to wonder about that, but even when we assume every ESL speaker to be fluent enough the proportion only drops to 80%.
  - brettp 3y ago
    I wonder where that statistic came from too. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... the number of L2 speakers of English is ~1b or 12.5% of the world population (~8b). But one thing that's missed is the advantage ESL speakers have: they by definition speak at least one other language. English speakers either don't have to or find it too hard to find someone to practise on even if they want to learn. The fact that English is the lingua franca of science has another advantage even to ESL speakers: they only have to learn English to communicate with just about any other scientist in the world. Imagine having to pick between learning English, French, German, Japanese, Latin, depending on who you wanted your audience to be?
_8j50 3y ago
For tech and science, english must be used as lingua franca/default. This has nothing to do with any property of english or it's speakers, it is simply the path of least resistance for everyone involved. Due to media and existing materials, english (even badly worded/spoken) is much easier to pick up than most languages and opens up the most opportunities to the most people. Learning Chinese is for example is much more difficult for most non-chinese with no added benefit unless they travel to china or work for a chinese company. Perhaps if english was renamed to internationalese it would make things easier and more palatable.
Legend2440 3y ago
I can't see this as the injustice the article makes it out to be. Not standardizing on a single language would just cause more problems. If it wasn't English it would be something else.
- nkrisc 3y ago
  The author isn’t arguing against English as a lingua franca, but it seems to me suggesting that there should be more accommodations for those who aren’t native English speakers because they are at a distinct disadvantage.
tomohelix 3y ago
There must be a lingua franca and English is likely among the best choices, considering its widespread adoption and relatively low barrier of entry (try Japanese or Vietnamese and you will see what I meant). But it is true that there is cost to non-English speakers. Maybe we can lower the standard a little bit? I don't mean broken Engrish but if the sentences make sense and the grammar is correct, maybe that is good enough?
- akavi 3y ago
  Japanese the language qua language is relatively easy from a language agnostic perspective. Formality levels are tricky, but the phonology is fairly simple (very few "weird" sounds) and the grammar is on the regular side. The writing system on the other hand... IMO the worst used by any major language in the world. Graft a logographic system (already a bad choice to start) from an isolating language onto a highly synthetic verb system, necessitating a whole extra syllabary. Evolve numerous "readings" of each logogram, depending on etymology and history. Then tack on a 2nd syllabary for abstruse historical reasons.
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    > If the seemingly arbitrary and unique assignment of pronunciations to common combinations of Kanji frustrates you—[...]—and leave you wondering why anyone would do such a thing, concluding that Japanese has the worst writing system ever, rest assured that they don't have the worst ever. They just have the worst writing system since the Hittites.
    - resolutebat 3y ago
      Cuneiform signs can be employed in three functions: syllabograms, Akkadograms or Sumerograms. Syllabograms are characters that represent a syllable. Akkadograms and Sumerograms are ideograms originally from the earlier Akkadian or Sumerian orthography respectively, but not intended to be pronounced as in the original language; Sumerograms are mostly ideograms and determiners. ... Thus, the sign GI 𒄀 can be used (and transcribed) in three ways, as the Hittite syllable gi (also ge); in the Akkadian spelling QÈ-RU-UB of the preposition "near" as QÈ, and as the Sumerian ideogram GI for "tube" also in superscript, GI, when used as a determiner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_cuneiform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_cuneiform
pie420 3y ago
Learning English is priority #1 for any human being right now. If you are able to communicate in english, so many opportunities and sources of information open up to you. It shocks me that some countries aren't making it mandatory, but that's due to nationalism and not wanting too much emigration/brain drain I suppose. Not being moderately fluent in english is inexcusable in the modrn world, in the same that not being tech savvy, or not able to do math is inexcusable. There are basic skills that one needs to operate in a modern world. English is one of them. I appreciate the sentiment, but it's akin to complaining that "In the star wars universe, scientists who don't speak Galactic Basic Standard are at a huge disadvantage." Yes, they are, and it's their fault for not learning the common language. Same with English in 2023.
- zztop44 3y ago
  I don’t think this is as true as you make out. For the vast majority of people (who are born, live and die all in the same country/language community) should it really be their #1 priority to learn English? For example, a street food vendor in Chengdu, a phone salesman in Belo Horizonte, or a roofing contractor in Avignon. Or even a professor at a small university in Kagoshima. Learning English would probably open up some new opportunities for all these people. But to the extent they should dedicate years of study time to it? I’m not sure.
  - bitcuration 3y ago
    The same can be said about a cell phone, a car or electric. It's just a matter of time before the globalization and modern way of life hit everybody. But it's always subject to individual who's decided to go offgrid, one can always say No to English and happily ever after. It's a choice with hefty consequences, that's all one needs to know.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    It’s effectively a branch. It determines some things you can do and can’t so.
ilamont 3y ago
I have so much respect for students, researchers, and professors whose native language is not English. Not only have they reached a level of English proficiency that allows them to converse and share viewpoints with their colleagues, but also they can understand and express themselves using academic English styles specific to their fields.
- bitcuration 3y ago
  The point is such respect is no longer necessary or required. It'll make science evolve faster, which is the whole idea.
Qem 3y ago
This problem is real. As a non native speaker myself, I only became reasonably reading fluent in English around 19 years old. I remember well how hard was to learn it. Some things a native speaker takes for granted seems ludicrous to those that don't know it well. For example, in programming, pythonistas take pride in saying Python is easy to understand because it reads like plain english, like pseudo code that runs. Guess what, for those that don't know English, it doesn't make any difference. The keywords are as cryptic to learn as assembly opcodes or any other random language syntax.
dbcooper 3y ago
Manuscripts from non-native speakers place a considerable burden upon unpaid peer reviewers. Going through 10,000 barely comprehensible words is not fun.

22 points by isingle 3y ago

Conversely there is the advantage of the narrow waist. the state where everything has to fit in the same container. The biggest example of this is the internet, where we have many types of cable to carry information, and many applications that want to talk to each other, but everything speaks IP. see also: containerized shipping, nema motor mounts. So true, it is hard if english is not your first language, but there is this huge advantage to having a single common language that everyone speaks. today it is english, before that french, and before that latin.

jbm 3y ago
Broken English in scientific papers are, if anything, a problem. I have a brother-in-law who doesn't speak English, but gets his papers translated into English to publish. There is no way for him to really know if they precise, accurate, and correct; as the person who knows his own research the best, he simply cannot review the paper. As it might be possible for us to eventually improve our machine translation, it might be more valuable to keep his papers in Japanese.
- nmstoker 3y ago
  This is a fine example, because the text has a few grammatical errors but they do not impair intelligibility so shouldn't matter. The challenge comes where errors may have impacted intelligibility or worse still changed their meaning. This kind of misunderstanding is common and I'm not surprised it needs extra effort - I had a major disruption this week when an ESL coworker misunderstood the meaning of a particular ambiguous word in a project even though this exact difficulty was anticipated and time was spent up front to clarify it.

tombert 3y ago

I think it's extremely unfair how much of an advantage us native anglophones have in the scientific realm. Doing anything interesting enough to get published is hard enough as it is, and I have to assume that it's substantially harder for people who are also fighting a language barrier as well. A part of me wants something like Esperanto to take over this space.

dpc050505 3y ago
Esperanto just creates the same language barrier for everyone. English is an easy language to learn. I'm ESL and it's no big deal.
- ghaff 3y ago
  There’s probably a distinction between speaking/writing as a fluent and idiomatically interesting well-versed native writer and competent prose for a paper—which is fine for most purposes; an editor will fix you up. Most native speakers aren’t great writers either. Trust me. It’s a lot of my job these days.
- tombert 3y ago
  > Esperanto just creates the same language barrier for everyone. Yes, that's kind of what I was getting at; I think everyone should go through the same hurdles instead of creating a huge advantage for about ~400 million people while the remaining 7.6 billion people have to do extra work. If we chose a language that isn't really spoken natively, then in theory we could create a system that doesn't give an inherent advantage to any one group. Obviously that can't be strictly true in practice; a language like Esperanto would give advantages to people more used to European languages, and other conlangs or abandoned languages would have other issues. > English is an easy language to learn. I'm ESL and it's no big deal. Is that true? I've always heard that English is a hard language to learn.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    No one cares about abstract let’s make everything equally hard fairness And, as you say, Esperanto is still Indo-European and probably Romance so why not just go back to using Latin or French.
    - tombert 3y ago
      That's fair! I was just using Esperanto as an example; I'm not opposed to going back to Latin.

ghaff 3y ago

There have been different language barriers in the past—most notably Latin which wasn’t used natively by pretty much any speakers after a point and then German in some fields and French in European courts. But yeah, English has become pretty much the standard language for many purposes and if you didn’t learn it as a native it’s something you have to learn as a non-native for many purposes.

irrational 3y ago

>“Non-native English speakers constitute almost 95% of the world’s population,” Amano says. “If we don’t support those 95%, I’m sure we can’t solve many global challenges.” Is 95% an accurate number? What percentage are not native speakers, but have near native fluency? I've been to Iceland and Denmark and everyone I spoke to in those places could speak English with near native fluency. I remember meeting one guy in a tiny village in northern Iceland. He sounded like a completely native American English speaker. It turned out that he had never even left his village to travel to Reykjavik, but still had me fooled into thinking that surely he had spent significant amount of time in America.

bitcuration 3y ago
Norse people are pretty amazing when it comes to English speaking, next comes German and Dutch. It seems EU people are generally potent in multilingual. Granted English may be like a dialect to them.
unmole 3y ago
Iceland and Denmark combined have a population of ~6 million. My hometown has almost twice as many people.
lifthrasiir 3y ago
> Is 95% an accurate number? What percentage are not native speakers, but have near native fluency? You are right to wonder about that, but even when we assume every ESL speaker to be fluent enough the proportion only drops to 80%.
- brettp 3y ago
  I wonder where that statistic came from too. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... the number of L2 speakers of English is ~1b or 12.5% of the world population (~8b). But one thing that's missed is the advantage ESL speakers have: they by definition speak at least one other language. English speakers either don't have to or find it too hard to find someone to practise on even if they want to learn. The fact that English is the lingua franca of science has another advantage even to ESL speakers: they only have to learn English to communicate with just about any other scientist in the world. Imagine having to pick between learning English, French, German, Japanese, Latin, depending on who you wanted your audience to be?

_8j50 3y ago

For tech and science, english must be used as lingua franca/default. This has nothing to do with any property of english or it's speakers, it is simply the path of least resistance for everyone involved. Due to media and existing materials, english (even badly worded/spoken) is much easier to pick up than most languages and opens up the most opportunities to the most people. Learning Chinese is for example is much more difficult for most non-chinese with no added benefit unless they travel to china or work for a chinese company. Perhaps if english was renamed to internationalese it would make things easier and more palatable.

Legend2440 3y ago

I can't see this as the injustice the article makes it out to be. Not standardizing on a single language would just cause more problems. If it wasn't English it would be something else.

nkrisc 3y ago
The author isn’t arguing against English as a lingua franca, but it seems to me suggesting that there should be more accommodations for those who aren’t native English speakers because they are at a distinct disadvantage.

tomohelix 3y ago

There must be a lingua franca and English is likely among the best choices, considering its widespread adoption and relatively low barrier of entry (try Japanese or Vietnamese and you will see what I meant). But it is true that there is cost to non-English speakers. Maybe we can lower the standard a little bit? I don't mean broken Engrish but if the sentences make sense and the grammar is correct, maybe that is good enough?

akavi 3y ago
Japanese the language qua language is relatively easy from a language agnostic perspective. Formality levels are tricky, but the phonology is fairly simple (very few "weird" sounds) and the grammar is on the regular side. The writing system on the other hand... IMO the worst used by any major language in the world. Graft a logographic system (already a bad choice to start) from an isolating language onto a highly synthetic verb system, necessitating a whole extra syllabary. Evolve numerous "readings" of each logogram, depending on etymology and history. Then tack on a 2nd syllabary for abstruse historical reasons.
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  > If the seemingly arbitrary and unique assignment of pronunciations to common combinations of Kanji frustrates you—[...]—and leave you wondering why anyone would do such a thing, concluding that Japanese has the worst writing system ever, rest assured that they don't have the worst ever. They just have the worst writing system since the Hittites.
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    Cuneiform signs can be employed in three functions: syllabograms, Akkadograms or Sumerograms. Syllabograms are characters that represent a syllable. Akkadograms and Sumerograms are ideograms originally from the earlier Akkadian or Sumerian orthography respectively, but not intended to be pronounced as in the original language; Sumerograms are mostly ideograms and determiners. ... Thus, the sign GI 𒄀 can be used (and transcribed) in three ways, as the Hittite syllable gi (also ge); in the Akkadian spelling QÈ-RU-UB of the preposition "near" as QÈ, and as the Sumerian ideogram GI for "tube" also in superscript, GI, when used as a determiner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_cuneiform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_cuneiform

pie420 3y ago

Learning English is priority #1 for any human being right now. If you are able to communicate in english, so many opportunities and sources of information open up to you. It shocks me that some countries aren't making it mandatory, but that's due to nationalism and not wanting too much emigration/brain drain I suppose. Not being moderately fluent in english is inexcusable in the modrn world, in the same that not being tech savvy, or not able to do math is inexcusable. There are basic skills that one needs to operate in a modern world. English is one of them. I appreciate the sentiment, but it's akin to complaining that "In the star wars universe, scientists who don't speak Galactic Basic Standard are at a huge disadvantage." Yes, they are, and it's their fault for not learning the common language. Same with English in 2023.

zztop44 3y ago
I don’t think this is as true as you make out. For the vast majority of people (who are born, live and die all in the same country/language community) should it really be their #1 priority to learn English? For example, a street food vendor in Chengdu, a phone salesman in Belo Horizonte, or a roofing contractor in Avignon. Or even a professor at a small university in Kagoshima. Learning English would probably open up some new opportunities for all these people. But to the extent they should dedicate years of study time to it? I’m not sure.
- bitcuration 3y ago
  The same can be said about a cell phone, a car or electric. It's just a matter of time before the globalization and modern way of life hit everybody. But it's always subject to individual who's decided to go offgrid, one can always say No to English and happily ever after. It's a choice with hefty consequences, that's all one needs to know.
- ghaff 3y ago
  It’s effectively a branch. It determines some things you can do and can’t so.

ilamont 3y ago

I have so much respect for students, researchers, and professors whose native language is not English. Not only have they reached a level of English proficiency that allows them to converse and share viewpoints with their colleagues, but also they can understand and express themselves using academic English styles specific to their fields.

bitcuration 3y ago
The point is such respect is no longer necessary or required. It'll make science evolve faster, which is the whole idea.

Qem 3y ago

This problem is real. As a non native speaker myself, I only became reasonably reading fluent in English around 19 years old. I remember well how hard was to learn it. Some things a native speaker takes for granted seems ludicrous to those that don't know it well. For example, in programming, pythonistas take pride in saying Python is easy to understand because it reads like plain english, like pseudo code that runs. Guess what, for those that don't know English, it doesn't make any difference. The keywords are as cryptic to learn as assembly opcodes or any other random language syntax.

dbcooper 3y ago

Manuscripts from non-native speakers place a considerable burden upon unpaid peer reviewers. Going through 10,000 barely comprehensible words is not fun.