The Need for Linguistic Diversity in Science
According to the Cervantes Institute, Spanish is spoken by nearly 600 million people worldwide, so it is a language that the scientific community should exercise more and learn more about. However, the fact that millions of people speak a language does not make it powerful in an academic circle. A language will be powerful at the academic level if there are continuous actions at scientific, political, and cultural levels that many entities and experts must drive and conduct.
The Scientific Community Has to Publish in Multiple Languages!
Estimates are that, nowadays, as much as 98% of scientific research is published in English, while the percentage of only 18% in the global population can express themselves in this language. Such a huge difference opens a critical question: if our aim is to bring scientific research without any barriers into the societies, why do we not publish in other languages too? There has been a claim that multiple languages should be used, even in science, which is very important by different organizations with a great influence on the subject. Among them are the European Charter for Researchers, the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism, the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, the OPERAS Multilingualism White Paper, the Latin American Forum on Research Assessment, the COARA Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment, the Declaration from the 5th Meeting of Ministers and Scientific Authorities of Ibero-American Countries. All these organizations share the same conviction: any language has a value for science communication.
The Impact of Publishing in Vernacular Languages
As recently reported, research that has social value at the local, regional, and national levels is often published in languages other than English. The sharing of such research has significant economic, social, and cultural impacts in the regions where it is published. To be certain, like in the past, scientific knowledge is filtered through non-academic professionals. Present day translators include science communicators who, in turn, translate it for wider dissemination in society.
Diversity as a means of engendering dialogue.
The academic dialogues among interlocutors who belong to the same language community or who are functionally bilingual are that much more fluid. For instance, a good number of the native speakers from Spain and throughout the Ibero-American region often comprehend Portuguese, and vice versa. This joint comprehension allows them to share the same scientific stage to relate to each other and therefore collaborate and innovate. For example, in Spain where there are so many official languages, allowing rich academic exchanges to take place.
Breaking Down Hierarchies in Academic Publishing: Research produced by non-anglophone researchers still suffers the indignity of being treated as second-rate. This bias overlooks quality work; it is highly injurious and does not only undermine the effort of researchers themselves but goes overboard to apply derogatory statements to the research of humanities and social science. Besides the disrespect of what scholars come up with, such a bias enormously handicaps the world's academic community in effectively sharing knowledge with society.
The scientific community should support and promote multilingualism by making research results available to the people who want to use them. In case we fail to make any progress in this direction, academia will be unable to build and expand its audience. Hence, we have to labor intelligently in as many languages as possible through organized and unremitting efforts.
The Logistical Challenges of Promoting Linguistic Diversity
Empowering a language in academia is not a spontaneous process; rather, it is very carefully coordinated and planned. It would want politicians, science diplomacy, researchers, and efforts on the part of the public, private organizations, media, and other cultural publications. The Spanish National Research Council ES CIENCIA project demonstrates the combination of these actors in perfect harmony driving linguistic diversity in scientific research.
Why Artificial Intelligence Changes the Research and Academic Publishing Game
Changes in the production of scholarship worldwide are being heralded by digital technologies and new open-access models, combined with changes in scholarly practice. Research on publishers producing scientific content in languages other than English will go a long way to knowing this change. A clear takeaway is that making scientific content produced in any language visible and searchable online will be necessary to ensure that language's strength in academia.
In the field of scholarly publishing, this process of switching to open access has only started, especially in commercial publishing. In a place like Spain, for instance, 80% of scientific books are already being published commercially. This decisive configuration of the concept of online publishing will be able to afford policy and models that clarify several means of diffusing scientific research, inclusive of studies done in local languages and other languages. The use of more languages in book publishing will also enable the public to appreciate more the publishers' efforts in reaching out to audiences whose first language is not English.
Making Research Findable
Another vital aspect in ensuring publications, data sets, or other non-verbal outcomes of research are easily retrievable is highly scientific and technical. And this, in turn, helps to fatten the corpus of scientific literature in Spanish and other languages from which productive artificial intelligence systems can be developed. Otherwise, they will merely disseminate partial, biased, or even false information. Last year, a study commissioned by the Spanish government said that 90% of the texts to teach AI were in English.
The Need for Terminology Research
Terminology research is of great consequence for the avoidance of vague style in scientific discourse or incomprehensible jargon. Still, research in this area is of importance because it may considerably enhance quality in both human and machine translation, foreign language teaching, and large-scale document indexing and organization. The Spanish terminology studies are currently being realized within the TeresIA project with the Spanish National Research Council at the head, and encompassing the treatment of big volumes of linguistic corpora with the support of artificial intelligence. Such a project has taken 15 years of fighting and rise to be realized successfully in Spain.
Their language work in intensive and systematic away has also carried out in, including the Basque County, Catalonia, and Galicia. Such has dealt with terminology with the sense of importance to public language policy, but they have not worked according to their terminology projects.
Multilingualism is It Can Be a Global Issue
The question of more considerable place for multilingualism is that Ibero-American demand. In fact, their promotion is regulated by institutions like the Ibero-American General Secretariat and the Mexican National Council of Humanities, Sciences, and Technologies. While there are great needs answered by these efforts, balance must be maintained not to sideline other local and official languages in the region. These languages are further realized in the production of knowledge and even act as a means of passage of scientific information, as has been witnessed in Spain.
Each country has a unique role to play in the broader promotion of linguistic diversity in scientific communication. If successful, it will not be at the mercy of sporadic initiatives; rather, it will attest to the commitment of scientific communities to foster a culture of knowledge sharing, strengthening Iberian languages and, in this context, all languages in academia.
Conclusion
Whereas, in summary, a major threat to the inclusivity and accessibility of scientific knowledge is constituted by the dominance of English in academia. If democratization of science is to become experiential, then linguistic diversity should be embraced, with research published in multiple languages. This approach will enrich an academic discourse and ensure that valuable insights and discoveries do reach a wider audience. It may be a commitment to multilingualism: a fairer, more collaborative scientific community that includes all languages and their different views.
Post a Comment