Machine Translation and Global Research

Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community

Lynne Bowker, Jairo Buitrago CIro

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787567238
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

In the global research community, English has become the main language of scholarly publishing in many disciplines. At the same time, online machine translation systems have become increasingly easy to access and use. Is this a researcher's match made in heaven, or the road to publication perdition?
Here Lynne Bowker and Jairo Buitrago Ciro introduce the concept of machine translation literacy, a new kind of literacy for scholars and librarians in the digital age. For scholars, they explain how machine translation works, how it is (or could be) used for scholarly communication, and how both native and non-native English-speakers can write in a translation-friendly way in order to harness its potential. Native English speakers can continue to write in English, but expand the global reach of their research by making it easier for their peers around the world to access and understand their works, while non-native English speakers can write in their mother tongues, but leverage machine translation technology to help them produce draft publications in English. For academic librarians, the authors provide a framework for supporting researchers in all disciplines as they grapple with producing translation-friendly texts and using machine translation for scholarly communication—a form of support that will only become more important as campuses become increasingly international and as universities continue to strive to excel on the global stage.
Machine Translation and Global Research is a must-read for scientists, researchers, students, and librarians eager to maximize the global reach and impact of any form of scholarly work.

Chapter 1

Scholarly Communication

The triple disadvantage of having to read, do research and write in another language.

– van Dijk (1994)

This chapter introduces the field of scholarly communication and considers how English came to be established as the principal language of global research dissemination in today’s society. The traditional model of scholarly publishing is presented, and some of the challenges faced by researchers who are not native speakers of English but who wish to publish in English are explored. Translation, and more specifically machine translation, is analyzed as an option for researchers who have English as an additional language, and some advantages and disadvantages associated with using machine translation for research dissemination and information assimilation are presented. Finally, we address the emerging need for developing and teaching machine translation literacy skills.

What is scholarly communication?

Scholarly communication is the process by which academics, scholars, graduate students and other researchers share and publish their findings so that they are available to the wider research community, and beyond. As part of the scholarly communication system, knowledge is created, evaluated for quality, disseminated, and preserved for future reference.

Those working in the arena of scholarly communication today might be grappling with current hot topics such as copyright, intellectual property rights, metrics for measuring the impact of research, open access, or institutional repositories. However, the cornerstone of scholarly communication is essentially the exchange of knowledge. Researchers communicated before notions such as open access and institutional repositories came into existence, and we can expect that they will continue to do so even if current models evolve beyond recognition.

That being said, the world of scholarly communication is certainly in the midst of interesting times. On the one hand, in the years since World War II, the rate of scientific and technological research and discovery has expanded rapidly. New subject fields, specializations, and interdisciplinary areas of investigation abound, and with them come new terms and phrases to describe the new concepts, inventions, techniques, and practices. On the other hand, during the same period, the English language has increasingly asserted itself as the language of dominant use in many specialized fields. Both of these trends present opportunities and challenges for scholarly communication.

From a scientific boom to a scientific literature boom

The post-war flurry of scientific and technological activity bore witness to a corresponding explosion in the number of scientific journals that were published. According to Horguelin and Clas (1966, p. 16), this number more than doubled in the 20-year period after the war, rising from 24,000 to 60,000. In a more recent study, researchers looked at the rate at which science has grown in terms of number of publications and cited references since the mid-1600s (Bornmann & Mutz, 2015). Their bibliometric analysis revealed three essential growth phases in the development of science, and in each case, the growth rate had tripled in comparison with the previous phase. It rose from less than 1% up to the middle of the eighteenth century to 2–3% up to the period between the two world wars, and 8–9% between the end of World War II and 2010. Meanwhile, a researcher at the University of Ottawa estimated that more than 50 million scientific articles were published between 1665, when the first modern journal was established, and 2009, when he conducted his study (Jinha, 2010, p. 258). At this rate of production, scientists may soon be able to challenge fast food giant McDonald’s by claiming “over 100 million served” … and counting!

As described by Delisle (2008, p. 43), a technological boom is inevitably accompanied by a terminological boom. Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing; the birth of new fields, and thus new vocabularies, has long been seen as a defining aspect of scientific progress. However, Montgomery (2004, p. 1335) also draws attention to a number of linguistic challenges associated with such progress, noting, for instance, that increasing specialization has presented an ever-greater need and range of opportunities for the sharing of terminology:

the power to examine, analyze, and manipulate phenomena at smaller and smaller scales has brought the province of the molecular, once reserved for chemists, into immediate relevance for botany, zoology, medicine, meteorology, many areas of geology, engineering, and so on. This has meant the adoption of terminologies appropriate to such scales of observation and analysis.

Meanwhile, the cover of a 2015 special issue of Nature dedicated to the subject of interdisciplinarity proclaims that “scientists must work together to save the world.” Working together effectively means sharing a common vocabulary. According to Gray (2008), researchers who participate in team science need strong leaders who are comfortable in the various specialized languages in play and who can help to translate, for instance, what a microbiologist is saying in terms that are meaningful to an epidemiologist.

The rise of English(es) as the international language of scientific communication

Meanwhile, during this post-war period of intense scientific activity, another linguistic trend has solidified: English has increasingly asserted itself as the international language of scientific and technical communication. Delisle (2008, p. 43), in a comparison of the English and French languages, observes that since the era of industrialization, English began to take the lead as the language of science and technology, and by the 1960s, French was recording a “lexical deficit” of thousands of words per year as compared to English. In other words, new terms were being coined in English at a much faster rate than they were being created in French. In another example, a bibliometric study of public health research published in Europe between 1995 and 2004 covered 210,433 publications found in the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index (with exclusions of overlap). Of the publications, 96.5% were published in English (Clarke et al., 2007).

Though English is just one of many languages spoken around the world, it is clear that it has become the leading language for scholarly publishing. Montgomery (2004) suggests that this is in part because World War II greatly advanced the military, economic, technological, and political sway of the United States, and thereby also increased its cultural impact. The uptake of English in technical circles has also been aided by the rise of big science in the United States. “English, in a sense, has ridden a great wave of cultural and intellectual affluence,” says Montgomery (2004, p. 1333).

The Internet, too, was developed in the United States and was dominated by English in its early days. While it has started to become more linguistically diverse, the websites dealing with research products (e.g., pre-print archives, institutional repositories, and online journals) still tend to favor English to a high degree. Likewise, institutional sites, such as those for research organizations, universities, international programs, and so on, are also typically presented in English, or at least have an English version available.

In addition, there has been the globalization of science. Industrialization in developing areas of the world, such as Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Asia and Africa, has motivated the spread of research in many fields. Nowadays, important scientific meetings and conferences are held all over the world, thereby prompting a need for a lingua franca or common language of communication. Similarly, if a researcher from Brazil wants to contact or collaborate with a researcher in India, there is a very good chance that they will use English to communicate.

According to Bennett (2013, p. 170), the Bologna Declaration, signed in 1999 by the education ministers of 29 European countries has been another contributing factor. Intended to boost the competitiveness of the European system of higher education and increase academic mobility, the agreement effectively obliged universities throughout Europe and beyond to align their systems with that of the United Kingdom. As a result, academics throughout the Bologna zone are now obliged to publish in international journals to secure research funding and career advancement.

Another noticeable trend is the number of university programs that are being taught through the medium of English in countries where English is not an official language. For example, Wächter and Maiworm (2014, p. 16) investigated the number of English-taught programs on offer across non-English-speaking Europe, and according to their study, the number went up from 725 English-taught programs in 2001 to a staggering 8,089 programs in 2014 – an increase of over 1000%!

In other cases, a program may be taught in the language of the country in question, but obligatory courses in English may be part of the curriculum. One such example is provided by Ford, Faires, Hirsch, and Carranza (2017), who describe a newly established master’s program in Library and Information Science offered at a university in Honduras where students are required to take a “Technical English Applied to Librarianship” course. According to Ford et al. (2017, p. 81), this course was included in the program for several reasons, which include the following:

• To facilitate reading the library and information science literature, since most of the information in this field is written in English.
• To improve English language proficiency so that – in a world in which most scientific information is published in English – librarians are equipped to help their patrons’ access, understand, and use information.
• To enable librarians to communicate with their colleagues at similar institutions in other countries and to establish strategic links for sharing information, staying up-to-date in their knowledge, and participating in professional exchanges.

In addition, many universities in English-speaking countries are welcoming increasing numbers of international students. According to the Institute of International Education (2016), in the 2015/2016 academic year, the number of international students in the United States topped one million and had increased by more than 7% over the previous year. China, India, and Saudi Arabia were the three countries with the greatest number of students in the United States. Meanwhile, data released by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (2016) indicate that in the year 2016, there were 412,101 international students in Canada, which is up significantly from 179,149 in 2007. The top three countries from which these international students hailed in 2016 are China, India, and Korea. Indeed, not only are North American institutions open to welcoming international students, many of them are actively trying to attract them. For instance, in the University of Ottawa’s (2014) most recent strategic plan, internationalization is presented as one of the four main goals for this institution. According to this plan, by the year 2020, the University of Ottawa seeks to double the number of international graduate students and increase the number of international undergraduate students by 50%, for a total of 3,650 international students, or 9% of the entire student body.

However, while there is much talk of how English is becoming the global language of research, another question that has been raised is whether researchers everywhere speak the same English. No single country or culture owns or has control of the features or direction of scientific English – it is truly the result of an evolving and cumulative international effort – and so it may actually be more correct to speak of Englishes or varieties of English. In fact, it has been well documented that when English is imported into a linguistic community, it is modified and adapted (e.g., Crystal, 2003). Accordingly, the variety of scientific English that is spoken by researchers in Korea is not precisely the same as that spoken by researchers in China, or India, and so on. Of course, there must be a strong common core. If varieties of scientific English diverge too far, there would be no reason to employ them. Still, there are enough differences to make communication challenging at times.

Another type of challenge may be faced by those who have only a limited command of English. While English as the common language of science has great potential to increase possibilities for study-abroad opportunities, scientific exchange, international collaboration, and career mobility, these avenues may not be equally open to scientists or students who have varying degrees of English proficiency, and they may be particularly difficult for those with limited English proficienc...