Speaking Your Mind

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. Related Articles Language Barrier 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?" rgallagher@the-scientist.com References 1. www.icsu.org/10_icsu75/75ANNIV_Intro.html

Speaking Your Mind

Most life scientists are working at an enormous disadvantage, and their resentment is growing.

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