Volume 22 |
Issue 4 |
Page 13
Date: 2008-04-01
Date: 2008-04-01
Speaking Your MindMost life scientists are working at an enormous disadvantage, and their resentment is growing.
How would you cope if you had to describe complex ideas, convey fine nuances in data interpretation, and express your most creative thoughts in an alien language with a totally different vocabulary and an illogical structure? Not only that, you would have to do this while many of your colleagues and competitors, who also act as the gatekeepers of your subject, are happily working away in their mother tongue. Hardly a level playing field, is it? And yet this is precisely the situation in which most researchers, teachers, students, and even schoolchildren find themselves. They might speak any one of more than 6,000 languages used in the world today, but if they don't communicate in English, then the sciences, especially the life sciences, are closed to them. This generates huge disconnects — make that discrimination — in information sharing and opportunity. It's something that the Anglophone science community is, at best, unaware of and, at worst, happy to embrace in these competition-dominated times. Hardly the image of international harmony that most scientists pay lip service to, and there is growing awareness and resentment of the issue among non-Anglophones. Little has been done to assess the impact of monolingualism in science, let alone deal with it, but a session at the AAAS meeting in February at least laid out the issues. The participants in that panel have been kind enough to supply me with their slides, which can be accessed at www.the-scientist.com/languagebarrier. There are two broad issues: fairness and efficiency. The first can't be disputed; it is patently unjust to force the majority to work in a nonnative tongue. Aside from the individual struggles of scientists to make themselves understood, there are also institutional biases. For example, the various world rankings of research institutions include only English-language publications in their assessments. That Anglophone institutions will fill the top spots is a built-in bias in the process. Is monolingualism also having an impact on efficiency? Most certainly — consider public understanding of science. Journalists in non-English-speaking countries have the formidable twin barriers of language and complexity of the science to overcome in order to present the latest concepts to their audience, and inevitably, mistakes are made. Non-Anglophone scientists have a more difficult time assessing research, and therefore advising policy makers, who themselves are handicapped in accessing the literature. Teaching, even at the most basic school level, is complicated by the use of English terms in place of the native language. With scientific issues playing an increasingly central role in social discourse, the dominance of English is holding back the free exchange of ideas across most of the world, which may have consequences for all of us. Moreover, the Anglophone world has obvious economic benefits, although these remain to be quantified. The International Council for Science has the goal of "... universal and equitable access to high-quality scientific data and information ... and all countries have the scientific capacity to use these and to contribute to generating the new knowledge that is necessary to establish their own development pathways in a sustainable manner." 1 What can we do to bring this about? The first step must be for us in the English-speaking world to recognize our advantage and to acknowledge it, and I call on all research organizations to help raise awareness. We should also provide more language services at conferences, increase editorial support from journals, provide more training in English writing and more leeway in the presentation of research. Peer reviewers must never use substandard language to reject a paper. For now the more Utopian goal of a shared language of science, such as Esperanto or Globalish (which makes use of people's investment in English), is frankly a nonstarter. Perhaps machine translation will be the answer, in years to come. Having said all this, non-Anglophones may have the last laugh. Switching between languages sharpens their wits, and moving between different philosophies of thought makes them more creative. See "A Fierce Competitor" for one example. Their lives may be richer too — wasn't it Goethe who said "a man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language?"
Advertisement
Rate this article
From awareness to real changes by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2008-04-19 20:49:14] I have been educated and worked in US for more than a decade. Being where I am now in China, I would say a real important issue has been raised by the author, especially for the biological scientists. This sometimes is a sensitive issue. For example, if you hear a UN official speaking American idioms while other officials are speaking more or less "standard" English, it could convey some "message" that is not really intended. So I agree very much with the author. More translation from other languages to English could be one solution. I look forward to real changes in science communication. lingua franca by MARK BURGESS [Comment posted 2008-04-15 09:31:36] Science did have a universal language with a logical structure: Latin. It?s easy enough to learn (particularly if you are Italian or Romanian) and the Catholic Church ensures it has an up-to-date vocabulary. In describing English as a lingua franca, John Rodgers rather makes my point. Phycologists still use it and we should join them.
Best wishes Mark Burgess Let us be thankful for mono-linguism in science by Shanthi Raam [Comment posted 2008-04-14 18:01:48] As some one born and raised in India which is a multi-linguistic country, I am thankful that I needed to learn to speak and write only one language, English, if I wish to be a good scientist, a professional playing at the international level. I read Richard Gallagher's remarks with great interest. For getting my Ph.D. from The University of Georgia, I had to learn yet another language (French being my choice), as a second language. It was fun to know that many of the scientific terms be it French or Russian (which I also learned at University of Tennessee) are all in English. I for one, am thankful that I needed to learn and be proficient in only one language to be a functional, contributing scientist. Can you imagine having to learn 18 different languages to function as a scientist just in one country, India? Be thankful for the way things have evoloved. Having English as the international language linking the entire world is Great! Each individual will have to make a personal choice when planning their education.If the choice is to expand their knowledge, they need to learn English. Children also have very high capability of learning more than one language at a time. Many schools in India start teaching children three languages, regional language, Hindi (national language of India) and English. I think it is great! A personal and a historical comment by Bertrand Tavitian [Comment posted 2008-04-14 13:09:16] One of our manuscripts was once refused (to be honest, that was not the only reason for refusal) with the following remark 'the authors would be well advised to have their text corrected by a native English speaker'. I will always remember the look of total astonishment in the face of one of our co-authors when he read that remark. He was indeed a native-English speaker and a graduate from Harvard, only with a family name of southern Europe origin.
In his memories, Casanova recalls how he declined spending the night with a beautiful foreign woman . The reason, he writes, is that neither of them spoke each other's language, and "what is love without words?". Often, one's choice of a scientific carrier is driven by his passion for science: otherwise, who would accept a low salary, overwork, and permanent risk of failure? But, when that passionate scientist is writing his manuscript for submission in a foreign language, there is hardly any passion at stake anymore. Just a boring theme. I wonder whether that has not something to do with the present switch from science to technoscience. English is fine. Fairness would be appreciated by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2008-04-11 09:03:02] I find pretty unmeaningful to discuss whether we should use English rather than other languages. The dominance of English is a fact (historically, politically, economically determined) in science, as Latin has been for centuries. English has also some distinctive advantages over other languages (at least my mother language). It allows to express concepts more straightforwardly, with less words and importantly it has a dynamic structure.
What would be greatly appreciated, indeed, is fairness. Like journals, people, institutions should use International English grammar, accent, avoiding local or national expressions. And possibly to avoid more subtle politically motivated discriminations. As a matter of fact it is easier to publish in a high IF UK, US journal if you are from one of those countries. On the bright side, it is motivating people to start collaborations to get in those journals! There is a place for Esperanto by Elizabeth Stanley [Comment posted 2008-04-11 04:37:38] I agree with Richard Gallagher that some important scientific contributions are being lost to the world because if research isn't published in English, hardly anyone will read it. Witness the crucial research on Asperger's syndrome, published in German in 1947 but not available in English till 1981.
I'm sorry Mr (Dr?) Gallagher views Esperanto as a non-starter. It was, after all, invented by a scientist with the aim of creating a tool for international co-operation of precisely the kind most scientists would wish to see. Surely it's worth a little scientific experiment? Why not encourage readers of this periodical to log on to one of the many websites which teach Esperanto, and see if within a few months they could read some of the scientific texts published in that language? At the very least they might set up an Internet forum for scientific debate which would be truly international. Try www.lernu.net If it wasn't English, it could have been Chinese... by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2008-04-10 12:38:21] The fact remains that scientific wisdom can be communicated in its most unbiased form non-verbally, through numbers and pictures. Monolinguism happens to help the spread of experimentally untested ideas and hypotheses. To me this is a non-issue. Efficiency by Rick Miller [Comment posted 2008-04-10 07:47:54] Mr. Gallagher, I'm glad to see that you're raising awareness of the language problem but you didn't suggest a reasonable solution and it appears that you may have missed a couple things.
The conflict is a matter of efficiency. Suggesting that all scientists' native languages should be respected for publication merely shifts the burden onto translators. The cost doesn't vanish, in fact it gets worse as the number of translators approaches the square of the number of languages. Having a single language is more efficient than supporting many. The more languages considered, the more efficient a single language - even a difficult one. One can't dispute the math. However, language doesn't have to be difficult. A language without exceptions to every rule would be easier, don't you think? What if it only had sixteen rules, wouldn't that be easier still? A person can learn such a language in less than a quarter of the time it would take to learn English. Perhaps you have been misinformed, but Esperanto is not a "nonstarter". It's the best solution to the language problem and it's already coming increasingly into use. Lessons of Babel by Andrew Wetzel [Comment posted 2008-04-09 15:29:19] "Asking for more languages is like crying for Babel's tower to come back on Earth."
The Tower of Babel (from Genesis 11) is the story of a monolingual culture, efficient and powerful in it's achievements but unhumbled by any need (or desire!) to cope with linguistic and cultural diversity--and thus displeasing to God. The Biblical story recognizes that there may be efficiency and advantages in a single common tongue, but a that culturally narrow advantage is not always judged to be a good thing. Are there more modern inquiries (perhaps in the history of science or in emerging fields such as the study of "biocultural diversity")that can shed some rigorous light on the benefits of larger-scale cultural and linguistic diversity among scientists? As the commenters so far have pointed out, the set of languages used in the practice of science is both dynamic and relatively narrow, and that having a privileged / dominant language has historically been the way scientists have overcome linguistic barriers to efficient work. Many do not see this as a problem, but as one commenter asks, "I wonder if all of the European-origin and English speakers would be so enthusiastic about monolingualism if the language of science was to become Chinese?" The issue is not really which language(s) to use, but "universal and equitable access to high-quality scientific data and information...and...the scientific capacity to use these." In the interests of both fairness and efficiency, Gallagher argues for a vigourous approach to overcoming the barriers that existing linguistic diversity creates among scientists (including both training in English and tolerance for variation in language skills), notes that the problem is not ever likely to be solved by any single dominant language, and hints that that multilingualism may not be so bad for scientists. When we have claimed the benefits of overcoming the barriers imposed by language, and have also learned just what the benefits of linguistic diversity might be, we will finally have learned the lessons of Babel. English as a lingua franca by John Rodgers [Comment posted 2008-04-09 13:40:27] I tell my students that Scientific English is not quite the same as English. Key features of Scientific English include the high level of logical precision, the tight control over the use of metaphors, and the proliferation of highly technical terms and phrases needed for effective expression of testable hypotheses and controlled experimental results. Another key differences is the frequent and nuanced citation of scientific literature. Through citations, the literature serves as a sort of "intellectual commons" - but it must remain "common" if it is to carry out this function well.
Some native English speakers no doubt do have an advantage in transiting from English to Scientific English. This is not, however, the general case. Indeed, many native English speaking graduates of U.S. undergraduate programs have not learned how to write with logical precision (and some or perhaps much of the blame for this should assigned to undergraduate institutions.) Good Fit by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2008-04-09 13:25:38] English happens to be a good fit with scientific description. It is concise and clearly defined. For example, many languages rely much more heavily on context for meaning (like not having separate words for he, she, his, her) and some can be very wordy - think of the Romance languages- to say "centrifuge lid" you have to say "the lid of the centrifuge". We could do a lot worse than having English as the common language in science. Natural progression by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2008-04-09 13:18:36] Rapid communication is facilitated by a common language. As others have pointed out, it used to be German for chemistry, and French for biology (I had to pass a French test which involved translation of a scientific article to get my Ph.D. in biology). This progressed naturally from which country was making the fastest progress in a given field. America happens to be at the forefront of a lot of fields right now. If China were to start publishing a huge body of groundbreaking cutting-edge work only in Chinese, you can bet that we would all be scrambling to learn it. chinese as the next exclusive science language, lets put our-selves in other people's shoes for a change by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2008-04-09 12:53:55] I wonder if the European of all origin and English speakers would be so enthusiastics about monolinguism if the language of science was to become chinese ? After all there will soon be more chinese scientists than any other.
It is obvious that a common language is essential but it should not just reflect balance of power but take into account the necessity of easy access to science even for those who are no gifted for language, it is not much to ask but does represent a challenge. Another View of English as the Language of Science by James Wilmer [Comment posted 2008-04-09 12:49:19] I wonder whether the bigger issue with non-English speakers and writers is that the "language of science" has become increasingly complex and has now hit crisis proportions even for English-speaking scientists. In other words, English may be acceptable--even if grudgingly so--as the unifying language of science, but we are writing in grinding detail about smaller and smaller things, we spout acronyms and abbreviations until they come out of our ears, and we write like lawyers, not scientists, with incredibly nuanced and convoluted statements. In other words we don't write in plain English and "mean what we say and say what we mean." This has to make scientific writing extraordinarily difficult for the non-English speaker.
While reading as much of the cytogenetics literature as I could get my hands on over the years, I noticed that the scientists in one laboratory in California wrote very clearly and had a similar style. It just so happened that I interviewed at that laboratory years ago and was told that they had a science writer on staff who organized their documents, corrected their English, and essentially rewrote their manuscripts. I'm not saying that every laboratory could afford a full-time science writer, but it could pay off for itself with more grants and higher chances of publications in good journals. Monolingualism by ROBERT HURST [Comment posted 2008-04-09 12:32:08] Recently I was invited to speak at an international medical conference held in Hamburg, Germany. The majority of the attendees were German, but others came from France, Sweden, Norway and other countries. At one time I was fluent in German and so offered to deliver my address in German. The conference organizers quickly informed me that the French attendees would certainly not understand me, and probably neither would most of the non-German speakers.
Of necessity, science always has been monolingual. No longer than a century ago if one wished to be an organic chemist, one had at least to be able to read German, and so all budding organic chemists spent a year or two in graduate school learning German if they had not already done so as undergraduates. Now English is the main language of science, and few scientists would argue about the desirability of monolingualism. Perhaps when the engineers develop the Universal Translator as seen on Star Trek, this will change. My mother was an English major :-) by Ellen Hunt [Comment posted 2008-04-09 11:59:55] "But I think speaking and writing GOOD in one language is hard enough."
Ahem. Correct English would be: "But I think speaking and writing WELL in one language is hard enough." (But, I agree with you and understand your meaning.) Fewer languages are more efficient by anonymous poster [Comment posted 2008-04-08 13:12:28] The author mentioned his "native tongue". How many native tongues would he expect to be standard in the scientific community?
It is logical to have global standards. It is logical to have standardized methods of measurements. Why is it that the author would like to move away from a single standard for communicating in the world of science? Monolingualism by null null [Comment posted 2008-04-07 14:04:47] Science has been limited to one or a few languages for thousands of
years. First it was Greek and maybe another language before that. Then it was Latin with a smattering of Arabic. Before World War II it was French, German and English with vestiges of Latin. After WWII it became English. Another language may emerge as the lingua franca in the future. Monolingualism evolved and became/is established because it was/is efficient and served/serves science and cummunications well. What would those opposed to monolingualism have us do? Use every language in the world? That would create a maddening cacophony in which scientists will not understand each other. Select a few languages to use alongside English ? If so which ones? And, would doing that be unfair to the languages which were not selected? Also, this will require scientists to lean several lngauges. That would be a hindrance for all. Publish all papers in all journals in several languages? The cost of this will be staggering. Frankly complaints against monolingualism and advocacy of polylingualism are either silly, driven by selfish interest, an anti English atittude or international political correctness gone amuk. Joseph Arditti Even as a non-native English speaker, English is the way to go by Alexandru Tudor Constantinescu [Comment posted 2008-04-03 10:50:12] I don't think "monolingualism" is such a bad thing, after all.
I think there should be one (and only one) language for the science community. Not necessarily the same for all sciences. I can easily imagine Philosophy using Greek or German, arts using French as "lingua franca", but the whole community should adhere to one single language. I worked in a few very international settings and groups. I can't really imagine how it would be if each group member would consider another language THE language. How would we all communicate? Ok, maybe I can talk to this one in English and that one in German. But how about group meetings, journal clubs and big conferences? You can maybe provide simultaneous translation at a big conference, but what about the weekly progress report? Should the group decide on a language which is to be spoken in that group? Then what happens at joint group meetings? What happens at departmental meetings? What happens at institute-wide seminars? What happens at [Insert your favorite nation here] Society meetings? International meetings? Where do you draw the line of "from here onwards we need translators" or "from here we should all speak the same language"?? Or let's make another assumption: I work for a few years in the States and there English is preferred, for obvious reasons. Then I want to pursue my career on a slightly different path and the best group is in France. But I don't speak French, so I can't really go for the interview there, as I can't talk to the group members, who prefer to speak French. (this happens, to a certain level, already, in France and Germany, but generally I doubt it's in the very best groups). In Germany --where I did most my work and I still live in-- there are already services offering to translate (or polish the translation) of a paper for submission. I think they do more harm than good. Sure, polishing the English is important, and all non-native speakers should benefit this from a colleague, friend, paid-for service or editorial staff (I am not having any help right now, as native speakers might already have noticed). But translation? This means those researchers are not able to read a scientific paper unless translated (yes, this happens, too: those services provide Medline translations). Even more, they are unable to communicate their ideas to other persons who don't speak their language. THE language changes in time. When my grandfather started his Ph.D. in organic chemistry, his advisor (who wrote a textbook used even today and still considered among the best in Romania) asked him how his German is. When the answer came "just a bit", he was told: "Go and learn German, and then all my library will be open to you!" (back then, what JBC is for biochemists, was Zentralblatt fr Chemie for chemists). In the '70s there were already bilingual publications, you had one column in English and one in German (or French). Same journal, years before, was all-German. Years-later is all-English. Can't deny this happened for a good reason. If everybody publishes in a different language, then I have to a) speak (or read) all of them, to keep abreast with discoveries and b) be able to write decently in any, such that I can publish in that journal I see more fit. An even more important point: in today's Medline, Google Scholar and, generally, Internet search-driven culture, how do I find all relevant information? Should I write my query once in English, once in French, once in German and once in Spanish? How about Chinese, since they will become more and more prolific? Or how about Japanese? They are publishing almost as much as whole Europe together. I am Romanian (as you might have guessed by now), so my native language is a romance language (i.e., of latin origin) and English does not seem as far away as, say, German (of which I also have a fair command), in what topics is concerned. I also do speak reasonably French (although it's rusty now). So please don't tell me that I try to defend my native language as "the lingua franca", nor that I don’t want to learn another language. But I think speaking and writing GOOD in one language is hard enough. Asking for more languages is like crying for Babel's tower to come back on Earth. |
Register for FREE Online Access
- »Current issue
- »Best Places to Work and Salary surveys
- »Daily news and monthly contents emails
Subscribe to the Magazine
- »Monthly print issues
- »Unlimited online access
- »Special offers on books, apparel, and more