The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
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Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
#2Conversely 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.
Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
#3I 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.
Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
#4There 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.
Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
#5Conversely 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…
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.
Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
#6>“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.
Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
#7I 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.
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.
Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
#8For 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.
Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
#9I 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.
Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers
#10I 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.
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.
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.