And thus guaranteeing that nobody will read his dissertation, and making it even less likely that he'll be a successful academic.
Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh
61–68 of 68 posts
Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh
#62Owain added new scientific terms to the Welsh dictionary. These include: “damcaniaeth dwysedd ffwythianolion” meaning “density functional theory” “brasamcan graddiant cyffredinol” which means a “general gradient approximation” “dull gwahaniaeth feidriadd” which translates as “finite difference method” Which sort of disproves the hypothesis that 'Welsh Is a Language for Science'.
There is a very good linear algebra textbook available online for undergrads by A.O. Morris written in Welsh (as he was a native speaker), after the English edition went out of print.
Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
let me disagree with that; many argues that modern science started with Galileo. The guy knew Latin. But he decided to write in Italian (and not Latin), because he wanted his results to be accessible to "everybody", and useful. I agree that English has reached the Latin status today, but - in the bigger picture - it's just spoken by a cosmopolitan elite, most of the people don't speak it or they don't speak it well.…
Actually that would result in people having to learn multiple languages to understand the scientific literature and make the baseline more "elite", like how mathematical research used to be in french, german and russian two centuries or so ago. Its better theres only at most one extra language to learn (English) than mutiple.
Plenty of research only last century was done in French, German and Russian: a friend is doing their PhD partially on the parallel development of climate science in English and non-English published papers - especially in Russian, for Cold War reasons, lots of work never seemed to cross the language barrier and was simply duplicated (or never appeared on the other side).
Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, Welsh is not the local language of Cardiff, nor is it for large areas of Wales (judging by % of Welsh speakers).
It might not be spoken by "everybody", but it is an official language. It was only recently that there was headline news over parking fines being overturned because the demands were not available in Welsh. The fact that the driver could speak/read English was not an adequate defense: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/10/driver-wins-... The Welsh nation has decided preserving and encouraging the use of thei…
Nit: "poster child" for the effectiveness [etc], as in such a perfect example that you would put it on a poster to represent them.
In looking this up to be sure of my comment, I learned that it originally comes from children on posters requesting support against a specific disease: https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/poster-child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poster_child
Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Just write it in your native language (Welsh in this case) and have someone translate it. For most languages, not a big problem and the uni surely has the resources to do it. Here, the additional effort is the creation of the Welsh words that don't exist and maintaining the list for a Welsh to English translator.
> For most languages, not a big problem and the uni surely has the resources to do it. This is extremely uninformed. Not only will universities not translate your dissertation for you, they usually won’t even revise the English if you are a non-native speaker and wrote in that language. You have to pay for the costs of language revision out of your grant funding or even out of your own pocket. And this is not cheap.…
Euros?? Where are you?
It's a Welsh university. I wouldn't be surprised if the university wants to both promote the Welsh language and diffuse its research, and proposes such resources.
Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone had told me while I was writing up that I should translate my thesis into another language I think my brain would have exploded
Really? Just write it in your native language (Welsh in this case) and have someone translate it. For most languages, not a big problem and the uni surely has the resources to do it. Here, the additional effort is the creation of the Welsh words that don't exist and maintaining the list for a Welsh to English translator.
Well if someone else was going to do it then I'm sure my brain would have been fine and there would have been no need for explosions. It wouldn't be that straightforward to find someone to translate a thesis though, you'd need to be fluent in the languages and have enough knowledge in the specialist area
Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For most languages, not a big problem and the uni surely has the resources to do it. This is extremely uninformed. Not only will universities not translate your dissertation for you, they usually won’t even revise the English if you are a non-native speaker and wrote in that language. You have to pay for the costs of language revision out of your grant funding or even out of your own pocket. And this is not cheap.…
Euros?? Where are you? It's a Welsh university. I wouldn't be surprised if the university wants to both promote the Welsh language and diffuse its research, and proposes such resources.
I am based on the continent, but I am a native English speaker owning a language-services business that serves academic clients internationally, so I am very familiar with the landscape. I for one would be surprised if the university proposed translation out of its own pocket. Even if one is dealing with a minority language that could use some support, universities overwhelmingly want the costs for these things to fall on some source of funds other than the university.
Re: Doctoral student completes a PhD in Chemistry entirely in Welsh
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
In order for a language to be used for science, it has to be made that way. For instance, 150 years ago Afrikaans was considered nothing more than corrupted Dutch. But the Afrikaner nationalists - for all their faults - did put a lot of effort into bringing the language to a similar standard as English: establishing universities, ensuring there was scientific and industrial vocabulary, and so on. They often took the…
Nowadays the momentum for the evolution of Afrikaans has passed from South Africa’s white Afrikaners (who have been shifting to English outside the farming community) to the Coloureds (for whom it serves as an important cornerstone of ethnic identity). Already there has been a lot of complaint that standardized descriptions of Afrikaans fail to account for how the Coloureds use the language, and moreover I’m not sure…
What is very interesting is that prior to the separation of the races around 1950, whites and coloureds spoke the same Afrikaans. I read a paper from 1948 which only looked at the white Afrikaans context, but which mentioned that most white Afrikaners were educated in English and spoke Afrikaans with forms which today would be considered typically coloured - i.e pronouncing the word for hands as 'hanne' instead the way it was spelled 'hande'.