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The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

nature.com

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Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

#21

Post by dpc050505 »

tombert wrote: post #11
dpc050505 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Esperanto just creates the same language barrier for everyone. Yes, that's kind of what I was getting at; I think everyone should go through the same hurdles instead of creating a huge advantage for about ~400 million people while the remaining 7.6 billion people have to do extra work. If we chose a language that isn't really spoken natively, then in theory we could create a system that doesn't give an inherent adv…

I grew up with francophone parents in the suburbs of Montréal, which is in the majority french speaking part of Canada. The context is special in that I live within an hour's drive of the border of places where english is the official language and that bilingualism is fairly standard in Montréal, I have loads of friends with whom conversation involves seamlessly switching between english and french. I got my first experience of full immersion at age 4 a few afternoons a week in pre-school, at age 7 I was in an hockey exchange with a new england family for a weekend, miming and pointing at things to communicate with people when my limited vocabulary didn't cut it, at age 12 started streaming TV shows in english and by age 14 I was reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

There's something to be said about my educational privilege and the geographic context of my being ESL. Obviously it's probably harder to learn english if your first language isn't that of a country that has colonized England at one point and you don't grow up within walking distance of the USA, but considering that billions of people have english as a second language and totally manage to convey whatever idea they want when they speak or write it I don't think my point that it's no big deal to learn it is outlandish. It's the most spoken language and it's speakers are all over the globe, there isn't a language that's as accessible to practice as english.

I think levelling by the bottom by forcing everyone to learn a second language (which would become a lot of privileged kids' first language after a few generations anyway) isn't a very interesting idea.

Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

#22

Post by nmstoker »

jbm wrote: post #5
somat wrote: post #2

Conversely 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 mi…

This is a fine example, because the text has a few grammatical errors but they do not impair intelligibility so shouldn't matter.

The challenge comes where errors may have impacted intelligibility or worse still changed their meaning. This kind of misunderstanding is common and I'm not surprised it needs extra effort - I had a major disruption this week when an ESL coworker misunderstood the meaning of a particular ambiguous word in a project even though this exact difficulty was anticipated and time was spent up front to clarify it.

Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

#23

Post by ilamont »

I have so much respect for students, researchers, and professors whose native language is not English. Not only have they reached a level of English proficiency that allows them to converse and share viewpoints with their colleagues, but also they can understand and express themselves using academic English styles specific to their fields.

Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

#24

Post by ghaff »

tombert wrote: post #18
ghaff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one cares about abstract let’s make everything equally hard fairness And, as you say, Esperanto is still Indo-European and probably Romance so why not just go back to using Latin or French.

That's fair! I was just using Esperanto as an example; I'm not opposed to going back to Latin.

And absolutely no one is going to do that so that things are more fair—and they won’t be for the large Asian populations anyway for whom Latin is at least as alien as basic English.

Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

#25

Post by goodbyesf »

tomohelix wrote: post #13

There must be a lingua franca and English is likely among the best choices, considering its widespread adoption and relatively low barrier of entry (try Japanese or Vietnamese and you will see what I meant). But it is true that there is cost to non-English speakers. Maybe we can lower the standard a little bit? I don't mean broken Engrish but if the sentences make sense and the grammar is correct, maybe that is good…

> There must be a lingua franca

Not true. The period of greatest scientific advancement in human history ( mid-19th to the mid-20th century ) had no lingua franca. Actually, the end of french as a 'lingua franca' in europe in the first half of 1800s can partly be credited with the burgeoning of science ( and other academic fields ) in britain, germany, russia, etc. Just like the ending of latin as 'lingua franca' ( beginning of the 'vulgar' period ) led to the burgeoning of religion, philosophy, literature, etc throughout europe.

> Maybe we can lower the standard a little bit? I don't mean broken Engrish but if the sentences make sense and the grammar is correct, maybe that is good enough?

Or maybe people should speak their own language and 'do science' in their own language.

What's more preferable? Having one billion chinese learn english to study algebra with an english language textbook or translated that one algebra textbook into chinese and have one billion chinese learn algebra in chinese?

The dull and boring mono-linguistic and mono-culture world has led to stagnation. The world would be infinitely better off when that changes. When we have actual diversity, not the superficial diversity where we look different but all think and talk the same.

Look at the tech world today. Look at just europe alone. How great would it be if europe had a german, spanish, russian, french 'google/apple/microsoft/etc'? Now broaden that view to the arab, persian, chinese, indian, african, etc regions. So much diversity, knowledge, creativity, etc is lost because one group of people want to dominate the world. It's tragic.

Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

#26

Post by Qem »

This problem is real. As a non native speaker myself, I only became reasonably reading fluent in English around 19 years old. I remember well how hard was to learn it. Some things a native speaker takes for granted seems ludicrous to those that don't know it well. For example, in programming, pythonistas take pride in saying Python is easy to understand because it reads like plain english, like pseudo code that runs. Guess what, for those that don't know English, it doesn't make any difference. The keywords are as cryptic to learn as assembly opcodes or any other random language syntax.

Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

#27

Post by tombert »

ghaff wrote: post #24
tombert wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair! I was just using Esperanto as an example; I'm not opposed to going back to Latin.

And absolutely no one is going to do that so that things are more fair—and they won’t be for the large Asian populations anyway for whom Latin is at least as alien as basic English.

Yeah, maybe I didn't think this position through. Thanks for pointing out some issues!

Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

#28

Post by cubefox »

tomohelix wrote: post #13

There must be a lingua franca and English is likely among the best choices, considering its widespread adoption and relatively low barrier of entry (try Japanese or Vietnamese and you will see what I meant). But it is true that there is cost to non-English speakers. Maybe we can lower the standard a little bit? I don't mean broken Engrish but if the sentences make sense and the grammar is correct, maybe that is good…

> But it is true that there is cost to non-English speakers. Maybe we can lower the standard a little bit? I don't mean broken Engrish but if the sentences make sense and the grammar is correct, maybe that is good enough?

We can't demand things like that. If a paper reads like amateur English, reviewers are pretty much guaranteed to turn it down with higher probability, even if the factual quality is somewhat better than of a well-written paper. This is just how the mind works. Like wine from a cheap looking bottle tasting worse than the same wine from an expensive looking bottle.

Re: The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers

#30

Post by zztop44 »

pie420 wrote: post #17

Learning English is priority #1 for any human being right now. If you are able to communicate in english, so many opportunities and sources of information open up to you. It shocks me that some countries aren't making it mandatory, but that's due to nationalism and not wanting too much emigration/brain drain I suppose. Not being moderately fluent in english is inexcusable in the modrn world, in the same that not bein…

I don’t think this is as true as you make out. For the vast majority of people (who are born, live and die all in the same country/language community) should it really be their #1 priority to learn English? For example, a street food vendor in Chengdu, a phone salesman in Belo Horizonte, or a roofing contractor in Avignon. Or even a professor at a small university in Kagoshima. Learning English would probably open up some new opportunities for all these people. But to the extent they should dedicate years of study time to it? I’m not sure.
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