
Researchers discuss the challenges posed by science’s embrace of English - salutonmundo
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01797-0
======
FartyMcFarter
I'm not sure I believe this paragraph:

> I’ve worked on many multinational collaborations, and I notice that European
> researchers often speak to each other in their native languages. However,
> it’s relatively uncommon to see Chinese or South Korean scientists talking
> to each other in their own language in an academic setting away from their
> home country. They just don’t feel comfortable.

In my experience, Chinese are one of the most likely to form little cliques
with their compatriots when abroad (and speak their own language while at it).
They're not the only ones to do so, but they definitely seem to do it more
than average.

~~~
ImaCake
I hear equal amounts of Mandarin, Hindi, and Portugese around my current lab.
Honestly, the people least likely to speak their native tongue are the few
Germans floating around. So my personal experience is closer to yours than
that expressed in the original article.

~~~
zaarn
Germans (stereotypically) prefer to speak English poorly over speaking German
if there is the possibility that a non-German listener might be interested,
the other's German is not 100% perfect or the other is a german wanting to
learn english.

------
type0
This article brings some pain points that many people might recognize, I know
at least one brilliant chemist that had professorship delayed by about a
decade or two. The thing is - that actually might be fair because if you need
to teach your students in English you should learn it and be good at it, but
how good speaker one has to be to tech chemistry, huh. Maybe the faculty was
too hard there, who knows, but sometimes your country of origin might also
play a role and not just the language proficiency. I think that some
discrimination happens even at that high level of academia.

------
btrettel
If people don't like English being the lingua franca of science, they should
encourage translation of foreign language articles. Unfortunately scientific
translation seems to have declined significantly since the 1950s and 1960s. I
wrote a Stack Exchange post about locating translations of scientific articles
and few of the sources I mention are currently active:

[https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143](https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/93209/31143)

The rise of English as the lingua franca of science certainly would lead to
less translations being produced, but I don't think it should reduce to near
zero as it seems to have. Today there's still valuable research that's not
published in English.

During my PhD I published several translations (all produced via Google
Translate and manual editing) and consistently people thought this was some
weird quirk of mine. But I enjoyed it and learned quite a few things I would
not have known otherwise.

~~~
jhbadger
It used to be required that PhD students (even in the sciences, and in the US)
had to demonstrate written understanding of at least one foreign language.
When I got my doctorate in microbiology in the 1990s that rule was still
officially on the books, but not enforced. But certainly before WWII and even
into the 1960s there was a lot of research being published in Russian, French
and German besides English. Even today, China still publishes many Chinese-
language journals which go mostly untranslated.

~~~
madengr
They had this requirement at KU in the 90’s, but a computer “language”
satisfied the requirement.

------
macando
> English speakers have become the gatekeepers of science. By keeping those
> gates closed, we’re missing out on a lot of perspectives and a lot of good
> research.

I'm always baffled with how disjointed and chaotic the global science
community seems. Why there isn't something like Facebook for science? Are
there grants for solving meta problems like this?

One interesting fact about using a foreign language: There is a research
saying that lying in a foreign language is easier. English is not my mother
tongue so don't take this for granted :D

~~~
danieltillett
Given the number of speakers of English in the world there really is no
alternative to English - maybe Chinese, but I doubt anyone in the world
outside of China thinks that it is easier to read Chinese than English.

Of all the problems Science faces the language used is the least of our
problems. Little things like funding, insecure tenure, and the immense publish
or perish pressure are what we need to be looking at.

~~~
mamon
English has additional advantage of being painfully simple logical, grammar-
wise. There's only a handfull of grammar rules to learn, and they are pretty
consistent, exceptions are quite rare. This helps to write clear and concise
text, unlike languages like, say, Polish, which evolved when Poland was under
foreign rule for over a century, and for that reason it is deliberately
cryptic and ambigous :)

~~~
aloisdg
English painfully simple, grammar wise? Wait until you tried constructed
language like Esperanto or Ido.

~~~
Swizec
Eh the hard parts of English arise because it likes to mug languages in dark
alleys and pick their pockets for spare grammar and vocabulary.

This makes it difficult to form a unified theory of the language. The more
elegant your rules, the more exceptions there are.

But it’s also a super power. It makes the language feel more familiar to just
about anyone who speaks an Indo-European language. There’s something homely
and welcoming in english for anyone.

And the readiness with which english adopts foreign vocabulary when practical
is simply inspiring. You can introduce basically any word from any language
and make it stick.

And then there’s Slavic languages where at least in mine, every verb or
pronoun can come in one of 20 or so different forms. Nouns have 20+ different
forms too.

Not expecting Slovenian to become lingua franca of anything any time soon.
It’s just too hard.

------
aluren
I've written various things in English (papers, thesis, abstracts, etc.) and I
loathed using that language every step along the way. English is such a clunky
language for communication, especially in science.

-It has loads and loads of words, many of them overlapping with subtle differences that go over the head of many non-native speakers yet still carry some kind of difference between intended and perceived meaning. Some of them are just synonymous, such as Latin/Germanic cognate couples (godly vs. divine, tiredness vs. fatigue, etc.), and you just sort of have to learn them all if you want to understand everything you read or hear. So you apply yourself and it turns out that you're still not understood because the vast majority of the community doesn't speak English as a first language either and also has trouble understanding one or the other form you're using.

-Its pronunciation and spelling is completely wild and inconsistent. You can't guess how to pronounce a word you first encounter. And in scientific and technical presentations there are a lot of such words! This doesn't even take into account the various accents within native English speakers (I'm somehow supposed to be able to understand both the Californian and Australian accents no matter how nerve-rattling they sound) and non-native speakers (who also have the same trouble pronouncing new words as I do, except they'll mis-pronounce it differently than I would).

-The way sentence structure is designed favors the apposition of many different words without any preposition, leading to ambiguities. This is of course exacerbated in papers with absurd word count constraints that must somehow fill the needs of print journals despite the fact that 99% of people read them online. It also makes for very terse, opaque and generally tedious reading. The only thing more annoying than reading a paper is writing one, because you're also going to have to write in the same opaque style in order to squeeze as much information as you can in order to fit your 3 year project's worth of discoveries into a 1500 word Nature letter.

-It's unfair that non-native speakers be discriminated on peer-review based on the quality of their English. Reviewers and editors like to pretend they're unbiased but they're not. The quality of the work is independent on the author's ability to write in a foreign language. I'll readily admit that judging someone based on their mastery of a language is not unique to English speakers but this particular situation is especially egregious since most native English speakers do not, in fact, speak any foreign language.

-It's generally a constant reminder of the cultural hegemony held by the US and Anglo-Saxon countries in general. Native speakers are advantaged since they have to learn less and are still less discriminated; scientists flock to Anglo-Saxon universities despite other ones being as competent if not more, but less well-known; the top journals such as Nature or Science are either British or American, reinforcing this bias. Univerisities ratings are often based on publications in these Anglo-Saxon journals, further deepening the bias. And lastly, Anglo-Saxons in general (and Americans in particular) have a very strong Not Invented Here syndrome whereby anything that was discovered outside the anglosphere is disregarded or met with much more skepticism than usual. Every so often an American paper comes out touting a new innovative "amazing" method that will completely revolutionize a field despite the principles having been discovered years before but outside the land of the free. It's frankly annoying.

~~~
cheerlessbog
What is your first language?

------
throwayEngineer
Is there any benefit to having competitive languages?

It seems it would only make communicating ideas harder.

Culture? At what expense?

~~~
type0
Competitive languages would hugely hinder the progress. Consider this: Mendel
discovered the field of genetics but Darwin wasn't even aware of his work
mostly because it was published in German, so we should be glad that the
lingua franca of today is a relatively simple language as English, although I
might had preferred Anglish if that was available -
[https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_leaf](https://anglish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_leaf)

~~~
gwern
Whatever the problems of having a lingua franca for science are, the problems
of _not_ having one are much worse. Weird that Gordin is the only respondent
to even mention this.

~~~
SiempreViernes
That is the obvious advantage that everyone knows, only tangentially related
to the issue at hand: the _challenges_ of being forced to work in a non-native
language.

~~~
gwern
It's not at all tangential. It is the core of the problem. Any 'solution' or
'improvement' needs to understand and acknowledge the benefits of
monolingualism. Look at Dharwadkar, who is calling for breaking up
monolingualism without any consideration of the costs, or Sheridan, who
advocates for more handholding by professors (because they have so much free
time as it is?), or her example of an Indian professor: if the paper is so
badly written that it cannot be understood despite many revisions, then how is
it supposed to add to scientific knowledge? (It's not like scientific journals
have very high standards for prose as it is, so that paper must have been
gibberish at the start.) Consider this quote:

> English speakers have become the gatekeepers of science. By keeping those
> gates closed, we’re missing out on a lot of perspectives and a lot of good
> research.

OK, so let's say we switch to having everyone publish in their own native
language because gosh we wouldn't want to be _gatekeepers_. Now instead of one
'gate', we have... hundreds, because everyone has to learn every language or
else they are being 'gatekept'. Oops.

This pervasive error, this nirvana fallacy, of praising only the benefits of
multi-lingualism, renders the entire discussion moot. It's a tissue of
complaints and buzzwords.

