Overcoming Language Barriers in Academia: Machine Translation Tools and a Vision for a Multilingual Future

abstract. Having a central scientific language remains crucial for advancing and globally sharing science. Nevertheless, maintaining one dominant language

Language barriers in scientific publishing: how many hurdles are there?

Find out more about the barriers non-native English speakers face in scientific publishing, and initiatives that are starting to help.

Assessing diverse values of nature requires multilingual evidence

2nd Helsinki Initiative Webinar on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication | helsinki-initiative.org

OSF

Prestigious journals make it hard for scientists who don’t speak English to get published. And we all lose out

A study of 736 biological science journals showed only a small fraction are making efforts to foster a multilingual scientific community.

The impact of researchers’ perceived pressure on their publication strategies

Abstract. This article investigates researchers’ publication strategies and how their perceived pressure to publish and to obtain external funding are rela

English dominates scientific research – here’s how we can fix it, and why it matters

Around 98% of all research is published in English, posing a serious problem for the global scientific community.

Artificial Intelligence: What the Future Holds for Multilingual Authors and Editing Professionals - Science Editor

Observations and predictions based on two rounds of surveys among primarily Chinese-speaking researchers conducted in early and late 2023. A Tumultuous 2 Years The increasing availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools such as ChatGPT for writing and editing, among other academic tasks, has prompted considerable debate among researchers, universities, publishers, journals, and other stakeholders over the boundaries separating the ethical and unethical use of such tools. Some, such as the Science family of journals and the University of Hong Kong, initially imposed strict restrictions on the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools, both deeming the use of AI-generated text as plagiarism.1,2 These restrictions have since been relaxed,3-5 reflecting a general movement in academia, both in education and research, from outright bans to embracing productive and ethical use.  Authors for whom English is not a first language (hereafter, multilingual authors) face greater barriers to publication than their native English-speaking counterparts.6,7 Multilingual authors have traditionally relied on editing or translation services to ensure their manuscripts meet journals’ requirements for high standards of English. However, not all can afford professional language services, and their use increases the costs associated with publishing. Generative AI tools can be a game-changer for multilingual researchers, bringing much-needed equity to academic publishing and eliminating English fluency as a barrier to research dissemination.8  As managers at a company providing (100% human) academic editing services, we were interested in how the authors we work with, the majority of whom are multilingual, perceived the recent developments in AI and […]

Climate Cardinals Plans To Double Its Science Translation Efforts With New Google Backing

The youth-led nonprofit has accomplished quite a bit with almost no funding: translating 2 million words in four years to make scientific literature more accessible to non-English speakers.

Dealing with multilingualism and non-English content in open repositories: Challenges and perspectives

Abstract Several organizations and initiatives have recently called for more support of multilingualism in research to promote epistemic plurality and raise awareness of the adverse effects of an anglocentric research ecosystem. But this support for and practice of multilingualism and linguistic diversity cannot happen in a digital or technological vacuum. Open repositories can play an important role in ensuring that research infrastructures have the ability to implement and promote multilingualism at scale in an Open Science environment. This implementation, however, is complex and does not come without its own theoretical and technical challenges. One of these challenges is to recognize that the implementation of multilingualism in open repositories can hardly be dissociated from wider concerns of discoverability, research assessment practices, and the anglocentric nature of digital infrastructures and metadata standards or protocols. Drawing on the COAR (Coalition of Open Access Repositories) recommendations report produced by the COAR Task Force on Supporting Multilingualism and non-English Content in Repositories, this article presents and critically examines how and why three particular recommendations of this document are particularly well suited to support a decolonial trajectory for the management of multilingualism in open repositories. More specifically, this article discusses the decolonial aspects and praxis underlying guidelines such as declaring the language(s) of the resource and of its metadata, writing personal name/s using the writing system used in the deposited document while providing a persistent identifier to disambiguate author/s identification and, overlapping with the latter, enabling UTF-8 support so as to promote use of the original alphabet / the writing system whenever possible, without negating the possibility to transliterate metadata by means of recognized standards (e.g. ISO). In so doing, we argue that these recommendations enable a multifaceted technology and politics of recovery that promotes a form of linguistic revitalization and strengthens linguistic diversity.  

Multilingual Publishing: Editorial Lunch & Learn

Join us for the next Open Publishing Editorial Lunch and Learn on Multilingual Publishing. This session will be presented by Emma Uhl from the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and...

Whose language counts?

This position paper makes a critical intervention in one of the mostly salient sociolinguistic debates of the recent years, that of the integration of multilingual speakers in language ideological research. Although many scholars now recognize the need for decentering the ideal(ized) ‘monolingual native speakers’, they remain the default norm in language ideological research. Indeed, despite our efforts to dismantle our own language ideologies as linguists, the implicit focus on native speakers and monolinguals proceeds to the erasure or invisibilization (Irvine & Gal 2000) of multilinguals. Drawing on research on gender-inclusive language as well as my own empirical study on L2 speakers of German, I show why integrating a higher variety of language users is necessary—not only on ethical grounds, but also on theoretical ones. Altogether, this paper presents the challenges language ideological research still faces despite ongoing efforts to tackle multilingualism and offers possible solutions for language ideological research to become truly inclusive.

Going Open Access: The Attitudes and Actions of Scientific Journal Editors in China

This study aims to investigate the attitudes and actions of scientific journal editors in China towards open access. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 Chinese editors from various scientific journals during September and October of 2022. The results indicate that the editors generally possess knowledge of open access and have implemented an appropriate open access model for their respective journals. However, the Chinese-language journal editors expressed a lack of motivation to adopt open access, unless there is a reform in the mechanism of academic publishing or a policy is imposed. On the other hand, the English-language journal editors acknowledged that they have no other choice but to adopt open access. This study helps us learn about Chinese editors’ understanding and attitudes towards open access, the current status of open access in China’s scientific journals, and the mechanisms of academic publishing in China.

Exploratory studies for the creation of a technology-aided collaborative translation service in open scholarly communication

Since the Helsinki Initiative in 2019, language diversity and multilingualism have become key concerns in scholarly communication. Among the initiatives working towards a sustainable multilingual science, the Translations and Open Science project explores the potential of technology-aided translation to help produce and disseminate research in multiple languages. This report presents an overview of the four exploratory studies conducted as part of the Translations and Open Science project in order to lay the foundations of a technology-aided collaborative translation service for open scholarly communication. More detailed information can be found in the specific deliverables of each study, cited as references in the present report.

Why English? Exploring Chinese early career returnee academics’ motivations for writing and publishing in English - Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

To improve their research performance in international league tables, many universities in non-English language dominant settings recruit academic returnees in the hope that they will increase the quantity and quality of articles published in English-medium internationally indexed journals. This study explores Chinese early career returnee academics’ motivations for writing and publishing in English. Utilising ecological systems theory, the findings show that the microsystem is reflected in the early career returnee academics’ interaction with collaborators, while national policies constitute the exosystem. The academic culture has a noteworthy impact at the macrosystem level. This study contributes to the understanding of early career returnee academics’ motivations to write and publish in English which will assist policymakers and university administrators to create a more beneficial environment to promote the accomplishments of academic returnees.

Towards equitable multilingualism: promoting transdisciplinary, collaborative dialogue between English as a lingua franca and translingualism

Inspired by Hult’s (2010. Theme-based research in the transdisciplinary field of educational linguistics. In Francis M. Hult (ed.), Directions and prospects for educational linguistics , 19–32. Springer) discussion of theme-based research within educational linguistics that focuses, first and foremost, on solving problems rather than adhering to disciplinary boundaries and conventions, this article calls for transdisciplinary collaboration to resolve educational problems related to monolingualism, native-speakerism, and the hegemony of colonial ideologies. More specifically, we make a case for transdisciplinary dialogue between English as a lingua franca (ELF) and translingualism. We argue that these two research fields, with their increasingly converging interests and goals as well as distinct strengths, can make a greater impact in addressing persistent educational problems through targeted collaboration, research, and (language) pedagogy based on equitable multilingualism (e.g., Ortega, Lourdes. 2019. SLA and the study of equitable multilingualism. The Modern Language Journal 103. 23–38). In this conceptual paper, we first introduce translingualism and ELF as equally legitimate multilingual theories. Next, we identify shared key tenets and orientations as well as distinctive vantage points of each approach that researchers and educators can take advantage of for collaboratively addressing problems within classrooms and beyond. Finally, we lay out a vision for how this transdisciplinary, collaborative dialogue can help realize more equitable multilingualism.

Cross-lingual extreme summarization of scholarly documents - International Journal on Digital Libraries

The number of scientific publications nowadays is rapidly increasing, causing information overload for researchers and making it hard for scholars to keep up to date with current trends and lines of work. Recent work has tried to address this problem by developing methods for automated summarization in the scholarly domain, but concentrated so far only on monolingual settings, primarily English. In this paper, we consequently explore how state-of-the-art neural abstract summarization models based on a multilingual encoder–decoder architecture can be used to enable cross-lingual extreme summaries of scholarly texts. To this end, we compile a new abstractive cross-lingual summarization dataset for the scholarly domain in four different languages, which enables us to train and evaluate models that process English papers and generate summaries in German, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. We present our new X-SCITLDR dataset for multilingual summarization and thoroughly benchmark different models based on a state-of-the-art multilingual pre-trained model, including a two-stage pipeline approach that independently summarizes and translates, as well as a direct cross-lingual model. We additionally explore the benefits of intermediate-stage training using English monolingual summarization and machine translation as intermediate tasks and analyze performance in zero- and few-shot scenarios. Finally, we investigate how to make our approach more efficient on the basis of knowledge distillation methods, which make it possible to shrink the size of our models, so as to reduce the computational complexity of the summarization inference.

Critical Care Science (CCS)

Multilingual Data Science: Ten Tips to Translate Science and Tech Content – Data Science by Design

Yanina Bellini Saibene & Natalia Soledad Morandeira

The anglicization of science in China

Abstract. The preeminence of English as the lingua franca in global science has led to English-dominant publication practices, even in non-English-speaking

Research Assessment Systems and the Effects of Publication Language: Manifestations in the Directory of Open Access Books

Research assessment is a major driver of research behavior. The current emphasis on journal citations in a limited number of journals with an English focus has multiple effects. The need to publish in English even when it is not the local language affects the type of research undertaken and further consolidates the Global North-centric view or scientific approach. The bibliometric databases on which assessments of universities and journals are based are owned by two large corporate organizations, and this concentration of the market has in turn concentrated the research environment. Open infrastructure offers an alternative option for the research endeavor. The OAPEN online open access library and the Directory of Open Access Books form part of this infrastructure and we consider the pattern of languages present in the directories over time.

CoARA WG Webinar on Multilingualism and Language Biases in Research Assessment

CoARA WG on Multilingualism will organize a public webinar on Thursday 26 September 2024 from 15:00 to 16:30 CEST on multilingualism and language biases in researcher assessment. Register here. In the webinar, which takes place on the European Day of Languages, the WG action plan, on-going work and opportunities for engagement will be presented, with time for questions and discussion. The event will be held remotely (on Zoom). Registration (with short optional questionnaire) here. Personal data is processed in accordance with the privacy statement for TSV Publication Forum's events. The Zoom link will be sent to registered participants by email. The recording of the webinar and presentations will be made available after the event on the CoARA WG webpage.  Program: Opening: Emanuelle Gardan (Coimbra group) WG presentation: Janne Pölönen (Federation of Finnish Learned societies - TSV) Results of surveys to researchers National Research Council of Italy: Ginevra Peruginelli (Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems/CNR) Marie Curie Alumni Association: Tereza Šímová (MCAA)  European Civil Society Platform for Multilingualism: Theo Marinis (University of Konstanz/ECSPM) Bibliometric analyses: André Brasil (CWTS/Leiden University) Focus groups on policy advice and implementation: Monica Dietl (Initiative for Science in Europe - ISE) Engaging with WG activities and closing of the webinar According to the 1st core commitment of the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, changes in assessment practices should enable recognition of the broad diversity of valuable contributions that researchers make to science and for the benefit of society, including diverse outputs beyond journal publications and irrespective of the language in which they are communicated. A thematic Working Group on Multilingualism and Language Biases in Research Assessment has been established by members of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), which aims: to raise awareness across all fields about the importance of “multilingualism in practice of science, in scientific publications and in academic communications” (UNESCO recommendation on Open Science); to provide institutions with guidelines, toolbox and implementation proposal for recognizing, rewarding and incentivizing research carried out and communicated in all languages, and for addressing language biases in metrics, expert-assessment and rankings. Building on previous efforts, such as the Leiden manifesto, Helsinki initiative, FOLEC-CLACSO principles and ECSPM declaration, WG highlights that language biases and language priorities in research assessment are one of the most important sources of global and socio-economic inequality in science. The consequences affect researchers from all fields and citizens across all countries. For more information: Janne Pölönen, WG Coordinator, janne.polonen[at]tsv.fi

Publishing challenges for perfusionists whose first language is not English | The Journal of ExtraCorporeal Technology

AmSECT’s Journal of ExtraCorporeal Technology is the premier global source of the most current research and information related to extracorporeal technology.

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Localizing the publishing experience. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

For non-native English speakers, the publishing experience can be difficult to navigate: from interacting with publishers and their systems and platforms to writing in English. Publishing in more local languages and customizing platforms and emails would be the ultimate author experience, but this might not always be feasible. What are considerations in making decisions around this? And what are the easier changes to make that could have a big impact on non-native English authors? In this webinar we'll hear from different speakers about their experience of localising the publishing experience. Join us for an hour of short presentations, a lively discussion and bring your questions to the panel!

Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning

Shivalika Singh, Freddie Vargus, Daniel D’souza, Börje Karlsson, Abinaya Mahendiran, Wei-Yin Ko, Herumb Shandilya, Jay Patel, Deividas Mataciunas, Laura O’Mahony, Mike Zhang, Ramith Hettiarachchi, Joseph Wilson, Marina Machado, Luisa Moura, Dominik Krzemiński, Hakimeh Fadaei, Irem Ergun, Ifeoma Okoh, Aisha Alaagib, Oshan Mudannayake, Zaid Alyafeai, Vu Chien, Sebastian Ruder, Surya Guthikonda, Emad Alghamdi, Sebastian Gehrmann, Niklas Muennighoff, Max Bartolo, Julia Kreutzer, Ahmet Üstün, Marzieh Fadaee, Sara Hooker. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Language and the Knowledge Economy

This volume offers a holistic understanding of the interconnections of language, specifically English, scholarly publishing, and knowledge production and circulation through a sociolinguistic lens in contemporary academia across different European settings for research purposes.The volume is organised around three parts: the first part explores individual factors underpinning knowledge production and their role in shaping scholars’ academic careers; the second part critically reflects on the challenges and opportunities for multilingual scholars in the academic landscape, examining the inherent tensions in the interactions between English and other languages; the final part considers the ways in which academic knowledge is institutionalised – at universities, private companies, and on a national scale – and the subsequent impact on knowledge dissemination. Taken together, the chapters provide a coherent and holistic overview of the affordances and limitations that different social actors experience when participating in such cycles, including the different modes of access to resources across geographic contexts and disciplinary traditions. An important contribution of the volume is the multilayered angle that it incorporates into analysing issues of scholarly publishing in today's academia, placing language as a social practice at the heart of the structuring processes that condition the creation, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge in contemporary societies.This book will be of interest to scholars in English for research and publication purposes, sociolinguistics, language and education, and applied linguistics.

Breaking language barriers: ‘Not being fluent in English is often viewed as being an inferior scientist’

Biologist Tatsuya Amano works to make science a fairer place for non-fluent speakers.

LSA

Four Reasons English Should Not be the Official Language: Statement Against White House Executive Order Designating English as the Official Language of The Un