Many scientific papers go unnoticed because of the linguistic gap between the global north and the south. English has become the lingua franca of science to ease collaboration but has it really managed to do so?
Valeria Ramírez-Castañeda, a Colombian biologist, has brought to attention the dominance of English in the scientific world. Valeria experienced it first-hand when her research on snakes eating poisonous frogs without getting ill, written in Spanish, went overlooked by the English-speaking scientific world.
The amount of scientific knowledge unknown to the world is significant. The dominance of the English language risks excluding the global south from the debate. Researchers belonging to indigenous communities from South America or Africa who already had to learn the colonial language are now faced with the challenge of learning another language to be internationally recognised. Surveys of Mexican, Spanish-speaking scientists and Taiwanese, Mandarin Chinese-speaking researchers revealed that these authors found it significantly more difficult to write scientific articles in English than in their native tongues. According to a Plos Biology study, paying more attention to non-English language research could expand the geographical coverage of biodiversity scientific evidence by 12% to 25% and the number of species covered by 5% to 32%.
Valeria, herself a Colombian, published research on Disadvantages in preparing and publishing scientific papers caused by the dominance of the English language in science, pointing out how Colombian researchers’ articles are rejected because of the English grammar, or researchers choosing not to attend international conferences and meetings due to the mandatory use of English in oral presentations. How could science become more accessible to a larger array of language groups? Among potential solutions, there is the idea to extend the use of machine translation. Another one would be that international scientific organisations would finance the translation cost of local science.
Translating specific terms is another challenging element. Local indigenous languages, for example, can have more than one single word to describe, say, forest snakes and frogs.
Although having a universal language offers advantages, the scientific world also needs to acknowledge and embrace work published in all languages to help diversify science and enrich research. The scientific world could opt for a multilingual environment where, let us suppose, English, Spanish and Chinese would be the languages of science, just like English, French and German used to be in the 19th century.
Could multilingualism bring scientists from different language backgrounds together and bridge the knowledge gap or do we really need a dominant language to take over the field, risking excluding some scientific groups?
If you are interested to find out more about this topic, we encourage you to have a look at the following articles:
Tapping into non-English-language science for the conservation of global biodiversity (plos.org)
Why English as the Universal Language of Science Is a Problem for Research - The Atlantic
Could the dominance of English harm global scholarship? - BBC News
Lack of non-English languages in STEM publications hurts diversity - Northwestern Now
Sources:
Is English the lingua franca of science? Not for everyone. | Berkeley News