语言是科学知识流的障碍

Language is still a major barrier to the transfer of scientific knowledge even though English is increasingly used as the global language of science, a study has found.

The research, published in the journalPLOS Biology，重点介绍了一个实用问题，包括非洲在内的世界许多地区的科学家长期以来一直在努力。

其作者密切关注scientific documents onbiodiversity保护published in 2014. The documents — more than 75,000 in total — were written in 16 different languages.

For about every ten documents, roughly six were in English and three in other languages.

The numbers suggest that English remains a leading language within scientific communities.

But the results also underline the fact that a great deal ofresearch仍以英语以外的语言进行，并且最终几乎没有能见度。

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That is particularly true for universities and research centres in several African countries that do not use English as their primary language.

这项研究的主要研究员Tatsuya Amano告诉他说：“我长期以来一直对语言障碍如何影响科学感兴趣。”SciDev.Net. “However, this problem has rarely been tackled by scientific communities so far."

以英语为母语往往假设所有important knowledge is available and can be communicated in English, according to Amano. On the other hand, he notes, non-native English speakers tend to think that conducting research in English is the first priority, and often they end up ignoring non-English language science.

"Ignoring such non-English knowledge can cause biases in our understanding of study systems," the researchers wrote in their paper.

“A francophone researcher will always need more time than a native English speaker to produce a paper of equal scientific quality.”

Cheikh Becaye Gaye，塞内加尔的前总干事

Amano is confident the findings could be useful to other fields beyond biodiversity保护，这是研究的重点。

Cheikh Becaye Gaye, who served as director general for research in Senegal, says he is far too familiar with the problem raised by Tatsuya Amano and his colleagues.

盖伊说：“在科学知识转移的领域，英语（研究）的生产与其他语言（包括法语）之间存在差距。”非洲人口的较低学业率敏锐。”

Gaye adds that francophone researchers are aware of the issue and have committed efforts towards learning English so they could overcome the barrier that stands between them and their English-speaking colleagues.

但是，他建议他们仍然面临很大的障碍。

"The outputs are never going to be the same in terms of deliverables, in the sense that a francophone researcher will always need more time than a native English speaker to produce a paper of equal scientific quality," explains Gaye.

这是一种挫败感，最初来自日本的非母语英语者Amano可以认同。这使他和他的研究团队提出了许多解决语言障碍问题的方法。

Their suggestions include approaches for compiling non-English knowledge, using non-English keywords in literature searches, and increasing the visibility of non-English literature through the development of a journals database and use of well-recognised online repositories.

为了促进目前英语中目前可用的知识的“多语言化”，他们建议将已发表论文的翻译作为期刊网站上的外行摘要以及支持信息，预印和原始论文的支持。

Amano说：“理想情况下，科学社区应考虑并采用我们的建议，以解决此问题，因此，要实现较低的偏见科学知识及其在当地问题上的平稳应用的汇编。”

这件作品由Scidev.net的撒哈拉以南非洲法国桌子制作。