Language problems in astronomy / development of space

[mithridates]

A bit of a vague title but I'll explain what I mean. I live in Korea where I work as a translator and I lived in Japan for two years before where I was a teacher and translator as well, so I've had a lot of experience with language and the difficulties companies over here face when they need to get something translated into another language to promote their product, essay etc. to the world. I'm curious what effect the language barrier can have in cooperation in astronomy and space development as most of the people in the business over here have a few people that are able to read and write English, Japanese or Chinese but the average person just knows English to a certain extent. The Japanese and Chinese space agencies are big enough that their languages are the ones used when communicating with people in Korea, and maybe some English as well depending on the circumstances. Then there's also the Russian space agency that Korea has paid to get their first astronauts trained, and they're over there right now being trained. My guess is that they're using English now but when the final two are selected to train there for a year they'll be trained in Russian as well.<br /><br />What sort of problems have all these languages presented when it comes to international cooperation? Most important documents get translated into English eventually but news of smaller discoveries might get hidden away for a while if nobody remembers to get the information translated into another language.<br /><br />I'm an auxlanger myself (i.e. I like and promote certain constructed languages) and believe that a language like Lingua Franca Nova (I don't like Esperanto) is the best way to solve linguistic problems eventually, but as IALs are not that popular a more realistic method is probably to have an organization that keeps track of information in as many languages as possible and translates transcripts of the information into major languages for free. I see that the page for the "I"AU is also on <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>----- </p><p>http://mithridates.blogspot.com</p> </div>

 

[doubletruncation]

I don't know about the space agencies, but English is basically the lingua franca for science. Almost all journals publish in english and most conferences are done exclusively in English. This includes country specific journals (such as the Journal of the Korean Astronomical Society and the Journal of the Astronomical Society of Japan - which publish in english). There are some journals that don't publish in English - e.g., the Journal of Astronomical and Space Sciences which is published in Korean, though they give English translations of the title/abstract. I have only once come across a paper that I really wanted to read from the abstract that wasn't in English (or didn't have some comparable version published in a different english journal) - so in science at least english/math are really becoming the universal language. In some ways it can be unfair to people who don't speak english as a first language since learning english really is a requirement for becoming part of the international scientific community; even if someone is a brilliant researcher, it will be difficult for them to succeed without learning english. It's true that if you go to a talk given by someone who speaks English very poorly it's often easy to wander off mentally and not follow what they're saying - so if they have a result that is moderately interesting you could easily miss it. However, in my experience at least, if the results are really really interesting usually the data will speak for itself even if you cannot understand the speaker very well. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[mithridates]

Yes, one interesting thing you notice over here when translating but especially proofreading scientific or other technical documents is that most people are top notch when it comes to pure terminology. In a field that I'm not familiar with (chemistry for example) I'll get a paper just filled with terms I don't understand but my job is to correct the sentence structure, not the terminology. A paper will often say something like (chemical a I don't know) was made join with (chemical b I've never heard of) and result in (something else I haven't the foggiest about). Then the proofreaders job is to change 'made join' to 'joined with', and 'and result in' to 'and resulted in'. It's these small things that really get in the way especially for Koreans and Japanese.<br /><br />I've never been to the States before (Canadian) - with the increase in prominence of Spanish has there been an increase in its use in science, or is its use usually just limited to culture and music?<br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>----- </p><p>http://mithridates.blogspot.com</p> </div>

 

[vandivx]

English is today's Latin as far science goes and not only science<br /><br />Koreans would have trouble with any language I suspect so why not learn English rather than something else which would at the same time require all world to learn something new and republish all the papers out there and you'd be mad to suggest that, I say just forget it and tell them to learn English and to read it a lot, not learn it from dictionary as I suspect they do<br /><br />I have some limited experience with Korean through an online game MMORPG and they are bad with English and you can tell if you ever buy anything with manual from them, tell them to ditch homegrown translators and for god's sake hire native english for combing the manuals and what not, even if they hire high school dropout or better some grandma who might proof read for them via internet from US or UK to make some money on side to supplement her pension<br /><br />vanDivX <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[doubletruncation]

There are definitely many papers where such proofreading could really make a difference, particularly if the verbs are used improperly so that you can't infer the meaning of the sentence from the context. So, I applaud your work <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" />!<br /><br />In my experience, at least, Spanish isn't really becoming popular in science in the US (I think it is mostly a cultural thing). There are many people from Chile who are astronomers, and they often speak Spanish amongst themselves - but they all speak English as well. <br /><br />One sort of interesting thing I noticed once at a conference was an instance where a native English speaker (from London) was not understood by many non-native speakers because he spoke too fast and used too many colloquial terms. I can sort of appreciate that since I find it easiest to understand Spanish when it's being spoken by someone who isn't a native Spanish speaker. I guess the moral is, it's easiest to communicate science between people who don't speak the same native language when you stick to terminology and avoid too much flowery language. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[mithridates]

Well, I'm certainly not proposing that an IAL be used as a language of science, certainly not yet. Science is usually more stable than standard language usage anyway, and even the English being used in the field today is loaded with Latin words. That's okay because scientific terminology really is another language for most people even if it's written in the language they were born using.<br /><br />Having given this a little more thought, I think what might be best in the meantime is to have an association that is responsible for translating content (or snippets of content) across language families, not just languages themselves. German, English, Spanish etc. are similar enough that sometimes a person will be able to struggle through a document and understand it even with little training, and even Babelfish and other automated translation programs can sometimes work well enough. But when it comes to languages such as Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian etc. that isn't possible. It might be nice to have translations of introductions to scientific documents in most of these major languages so that even if English is required to understand the whole thing, people of other language families would be able to easily scan or do keyword searches in languages they are more comfortable with. Something volunteer and wiki-based might be the most effective.<br /><br />Even easier than that would be the ability to add other language keywords to be added to documents printed online to allow searching. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>----- </p><p>http://mithridates.blogspot.com</p> </div>

 

[mithridates]

That seems to be the case. I can't seem to find any Spanish language astronomy forums on the same level (both quality and quantity) as this one.<br /><br />I wish more of the proofreading/translating I did was astronomy-related. The last document I did was eight pages about some kind of instant food that heats up by itself when you pull the string. -_- Blech. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>----- </p><p>http://mithridates.blogspot.com</p> </div>

 

[spacester]

My suggestion is to look to the open source community as a model.<br /><br />Much of the terrific open source software out there these days has the ability to be switched between languages by clicking a check box. This is done by having the languages each in their own folder, where the contents are the snippets of actual language used in the software for prompts and output statements and all the rest.<br /><br />This works well because the main part of the software package is the programming, which doesn't care what human language is used, and the various translations of the same statements are treated as data.<br /><br />Now, what you've got appears to be similar but opposite in the sense that you have the lingual data as the main part of the information content. But perhaps that model could inform your thinking. <br /><br />There is a core of logical information at the heart of scientific discourse that could serve as a parallel to the programming information in software, but it is specialized as well, so the task is again made harder. Maybe you would look to modularizing the scientific disciplines at the same time as modularizing the human languages, matrix the modules to determine which boxes you can ignore, and find a way to use a uniform method to assemble the content. Yikes!<br /><br />The reason why the open source software gets translated so widely is that the guy who does it first is the first guy in his country to have the opportunity to exploit it commercially. There is doubtless a lesson there as well. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>