Lost in translation: is research into species being missed because of a language barrier?

V aleria Ramírez Castañeda is a Biologist and spends her time in the Amazon studying how snakes eat poisonous Frogs. In her years as a researcher, she and her colleagues have struggled to get their discoveries out to the wider scientific community. She had to translate her research into English so it could be published. It means that some of her findings were never published because of budget or time constraints.

She says it's not that she's a bad scientist.

Ramírez Castañeda is not the only one. There is a lot of research in non-English-language papers that gets lost in translation or is never translated, creating a gap in the global community's scientific knowledge. As the amount of scientific research increases, so does the gap. This is true for both species. Research about native traditions and knowledge is often done in the domestic non-colonial language.

It’s not that I’m a bad scientist. It’s just because of the language

The study found that by paying more attention to non-English language research, the geographical coverage of scientific evidence could be expanded by 12% to 25%. We are not using scientific evidence published in non-English-languages at the international level, but if we could make a better use of it.

He and his team looked at more than 400,000 peer-reviewed papers in 16 different languages and found 1,234 studies that provided evidence on the topic of biodiversity. The effectiveness of relocating the Blakiston's fish owl, the largest owl species, and a Spanish-language study on the use of guardian dogs to alleviate conflict between farmers and mountain cats were included.

Although some non-English language studies don't meet international standards, steps can be taken to help the community overcome language barriers, says Amano, who has published a guide in the journal Science.

English should be the main language of science according to some experts. Scott Montgomery is a scientist at the University of Washington and author of Does Science Need a Global Language?

The use of a global language is important for science because it is globalised. It's not just for efficiency, it's for collaboration, Montgomery says. It is a very basic, fundamental skill that you need to participate in.

Translating science into a more widely used language has been a standard practice in the history of science.

The amount of scientific knowledge that needs to be translated is huge. Machine translation was originally developed to translate Russian science into English. Another option would be to have large international scientific organisation subsidise the translation and copy-editing of local science into a universal language. In the 19th century, English, French and German were the languages of science and scientists were expected to have a passive knowledge of all three.

A researcher at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa argues that the language gap is a problem worth tackling.

She says that global south scientists and their science are not taken into consideration in the same way as global north scientists. She argues in a recent paper that researchers from Lusophone Africa are being overlooked in the fight to combat the climate crisis.

Hunter says that the language gap is a reason for the lack of international influence. Many biologists from indigenous communities in South America or Africa, who have already had to learn the colonial language of the nation, are cut off from accruing more personal and professional knowledge for their research because so much of it is published solely in a language they don't understand.

The cycle of dependency on the global north is strengthened by the fact that scientists can work with an English colleague or translator. She went on to study science communication and published an article about the difficulties facing researchers in the country.

She says that the specific meanings of words can pose a problem in translation. Many of the local languages in the Amazon don't have a single word to describe forest snakes and frog.

It's not possible for me, so we're losing observations for science. We need people who are comfortable doing science in their own languages.

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