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> now that a team of international researchers revisited the site and published their findings in English in the journal PLOS One, scientists around the world a

> now that a team of international researchers revisited the site and published their findings in English in the journal PLOS One, scientists around the world are learning about the boats for the first time It's regrettable that research had to be published in a specific language for scientists to leverage. Maybe recent advances with language models can change the game here and make knowledge more accessible across all fields.

Staple_Diet 2y ago
>It's regrettable that research had to be published in a specific language for scientists to leverage. Not really. ~70 million people read Italian. Billions read English. The biggest journals are English language. Most of Europe learn English. Chinese academics learn to write in English, and English is the official language of India. It'd be regrettable if they had to publish in Science/Nature to get noticed, but PLOS One is pretty open.
- swores 2y ago
  I don't think they were complaining that the world didn't read the Italian research, just that it's a shame that people from non-English speaking countries have to either be good enough at a second language to write their research in English, or need to waste time waiting for someone else to translate. Along with hope that machine translation can fix this problem and remove hurdles for international collaboration.
  - Staple_Diet 2y ago
    It's near impossible to work as a professional academic without learning English well enough to publish in it. Furthermore, in many fields you need to move countries during your academic journey and learn a language. For example my previous PI was Spanish (Catalonian actually) but did his PhD in Paris, so he needed to learn three languages in addition to his native tongue. Other lab members were French, Italian and German, all again having to have learnt English so they could each communicate with each other but also publish. The international collaboration is already there, and it's aided, not hindered, by the use of English as a common tongue. It's a two way street as well, if an academic can't read English than they effectively cut themselves off from 95% of the research in their field, and most certainly the most impactful research. Lastly, most journals offer paid translation services and a lot of Universities will similarly offer a service, so it's almost a moot point.
    - swores 2y ago
      I appreciate that a lot of people successfully get round the issue of learning English, but isn't this submission a direct example that there are still cases where language is barrier? And it's not like it's a one off case, surely there's huge amounts of research published in languages like Chinese, and probably smaller amounts in various fields published in the languages of pretty much any country by people who want to work on science even if they don't want to learn English? I'm not arguing that it's high on the list of things that could be improved in the world of research, just that it's something that would be worth improving if and when computers are good enough to remove this friction.
- pvaldes 2y ago
  > ~70 million people read Italian. Billions read English. It does not matter. Researchers interested in old Rome or in old canoes will be able to find it. All articles have abstracts in English and academics do an extensive use of keywords and publishing databases. I had to translate a very old paper from Dutch once, before to cite it, and it didn't was an unsurmountable problem with the correct motivation. Dictionaries were made for this.
  - nradov 2y ago
    A dictionary is only one small piece of translation. Dutch is linguistically very similar to English so it's relatively easy to learn and translate. Something like Russian is far more difficult because it comes from a different language family and uses a different writing system. There is a treasure trove of Russian journal articles which have never been properly translated and represent something like "scientific dark matter". LLM translation tools can help a lot to make those more accessible.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    The dutch were in an excellent position at the beginning of the quantum revolution- they could read and translate english and german, and played a key role in sharing ideas between the two centers (Berlin and London) which were not highly aware of the other's progress.
deleted 2y ago
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overstay8930 2y ago
Erm, what? English is literally the most important language in the world. You're a nobody if you can't speak English in most of the world.
geraldwhen 2y ago
English is the new lingua francua. AI does a piss poor job translating nuance and context. If you cannot understand the language you are publishing an article in, you should not publish. Currently the language of the world is English. Maybe that won’t always be true. Maybe English will gain so many loanwords that it will look completely foreign 1000 years from now. But learning a language isn’t particularly hard, and the only real difficulty seems to be Korean/chinese/japanese <-> English.
- xandrius 2y ago
  That's because you're only aware of the "popular" ones. Lots of less known not PIE-languages (Proto Indo-European) out there that will make you reconsider your opinion.
  - rvense 2y ago
    There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world. My own first language, Danish, has about 6 million native speakers, and it is something like the 50th most spoken language in the world. The world is a big place. Did you know that there are languages where you can't form a sentence without describing what direction something happens in? Like you can't just "see the house", you're either doing it up or down the mountain. And you know how in English you can't really say anything without saying if it's going on now or happened in the past. Other languages don't really care about that at all, you can speak all day with specifying if it "is" or "was".
    - TeaBrain 2y ago
      I'm not familiar with Danish, so this background of yours may be influencing your comment, but I'm not sure what you think you are referring to with your last two sentences on the temporal aspect of English. With the romance languages the tense is often explicitly built into the conjugation of verbs. Korean and Hindi also have conjugation systems to specify the tense. English does not have a similar system, so auxiliary verbs are relied on. Romance languages and others that have explicit tense conjugation systems are still specifying whether something "is" or "was", but through conjugation, rather than purely auxiliary verbs. Of note though, is that in Japanese, base words do not change conjugation between tenses, but are modified with a auxiliary verb system, where the tense is specified with auxiliary verbs, as with English.
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Recent advances aren't even necessary; translation software has been a thing for two decades now, even back then it should be good enough to create a translation that can at least be indexed and interpreted as "this is relevant to my interests". But it's down to the scientists and their publishers to decide whether to publish the papers as readable text, feed them into translators and republish them in different languages, or at least the abstract / things that scientists use to find papers.

Staple_Diet 2y ago

>It's regrettable that research had to be published in a specific language for scientists to leverage. Not really. ~70 million people read Italian. Billions read English. The biggest journals are English language. Most of Europe learn English. Chinese academics learn to write in English, and English is the official language of India. It'd be regrettable if they had to publish in Science/Nature to get noticed, but PLOS One is pretty open.

swores 2y ago
I don't think they were complaining that the world didn't read the Italian research, just that it's a shame that people from non-English speaking countries have to either be good enough at a second language to write their research in English, or need to waste time waiting for someone else to translate. Along with hope that machine translation can fix this problem and remove hurdles for international collaboration.
- Staple_Diet 2y ago
  It's near impossible to work as a professional academic without learning English well enough to publish in it. Furthermore, in many fields you need to move countries during your academic journey and learn a language. For example my previous PI was Spanish (Catalonian actually) but did his PhD in Paris, so he needed to learn three languages in addition to his native tongue. Other lab members were French, Italian and German, all again having to have learnt English so they could each communicate with each other but also publish. The international collaboration is already there, and it's aided, not hindered, by the use of English as a common tongue. It's a two way street as well, if an academic can't read English than they effectively cut themselves off from 95% of the research in their field, and most certainly the most impactful research. Lastly, most journals offer paid translation services and a lot of Universities will similarly offer a service, so it's almost a moot point.
  - swores 2y ago
    I appreciate that a lot of people successfully get round the issue of learning English, but isn't this submission a direct example that there are still cases where language is barrier? And it's not like it's a one off case, surely there's huge amounts of research published in languages like Chinese, and probably smaller amounts in various fields published in the languages of pretty much any country by people who want to work on science even if they don't want to learn English? I'm not arguing that it's high on the list of things that could be improved in the world of research, just that it's something that would be worth improving if and when computers are good enough to remove this friction.
pvaldes 2y ago
> ~70 million people read Italian. Billions read English. It does not matter. Researchers interested in old Rome or in old canoes will be able to find it. All articles have abstracts in English and academics do an extensive use of keywords and publishing databases. I had to translate a very old paper from Dutch once, before to cite it, and it didn't was an unsurmountable problem with the correct motivation. Dictionaries were made for this.
- nradov 2y ago
  A dictionary is only one small piece of translation. Dutch is linguistically very similar to English so it's relatively easy to learn and translate. Something like Russian is far more difficult because it comes from a different language family and uses a different writing system. There is a treasure trove of Russian journal articles which have never been properly translated and represent something like "scientific dark matter". LLM translation tools can help a lot to make those more accessible.
- dekhn 2y ago
  The dutch were in an excellent position at the beginning of the quantum revolution- they could read and translate english and german, and played a key role in sharing ideas between the two centers (Berlin and London) which were not highly aware of the other's progress.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

overstay8930 2y ago

Erm, what? English is literally the most important language in the world. You're a nobody if you can't speak English in most of the world.

geraldwhen 2y ago

English is the new lingua francua. AI does a piss poor job translating nuance and context. If you cannot understand the language you are publishing an article in, you should not publish. Currently the language of the world is English. Maybe that won’t always be true. Maybe English will gain so many loanwords that it will look completely foreign 1000 years from now. But learning a language isn’t particularly hard, and the only real difficulty seems to be Korean/chinese/japanese <-> English.

xandrius 2y ago
That's because you're only aware of the "popular" ones. Lots of less known not PIE-languages (Proto Indo-European) out there that will make you reconsider your opinion.
- rvense 2y ago
  There are roughly 6,000 languages in the world. My own first language, Danish, has about 6 million native speakers, and it is something like the 50th most spoken language in the world. The world is a big place. Did you know that there are languages where you can't form a sentence without describing what direction something happens in? Like you can't just "see the house", you're either doing it up or down the mountain. And you know how in English you can't really say anything without saying if it's going on now or happened in the past. Other languages don't really care about that at all, you can speak all day with specifying if it "is" or "was".
  - TeaBrain 2y ago
    I'm not familiar with Danish, so this background of yours may be influencing your comment, but I'm not sure what you think you are referring to with your last two sentences on the temporal aspect of English. With the romance languages the tense is often explicitly built into the conjugation of verbs. Korean and Hindi also have conjugation systems to specify the tense. English does not have a similar system, so auxiliary verbs are relied on. Romance languages and others that have explicit tense conjugation systems are still specifying whether something "is" or "was", but through conjugation, rather than purely auxiliary verbs. Of note though, is that in Japanese, base words do not change conjugation between tenses, but are modified with a auxiliary verb system, where the tense is specified with auxiliary verbs, as with English.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

Recent advances aren't even necessary; translation software has been a thing for two decades now, even back then it should be good enough to create a translation that can at least be indexed and interpreted as "this is relevant to my interests". But it's down to the scientists and their publishers to decide whether to publish the papers as readable text, feed them into translators and republish them in different languages, or at least the abstract / things that scientists use to find papers.