= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Username comments on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (371)
Are there any translation efforts in academia? It bothers me that there may be huge corpuses of knowledge that are inaccessible to most scientists or researchers simply because they don't speak, say, Spanish, Mandarin, or Hindi. The current solution to this problem seems to be 'everyone learn English', which seems to do ok in the hard sciences. But I fear there may be a huge missed opportunity in social sciences, especially because Americans are WEIRD and not necessarily psychologically or behaviorally respresentative of the world population. (Link is to an article, link to the cited paper here: pdf)
If a hypothetical bothers you, maybe you should hold off proposing solutions and instead investigate whether it is a real problem.
I'm not sure losing the non-English literature is a big problem. A lot of foreign research is really bad. A little demonstration from 5 days ago: I criticized a Chinese study on moxibustion https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/TisYM64ckLM
This was translated into / written in English and published in a peer-reviewed journal (Neural Regeneration Research). And it's complete crap.
Of course there is very bad research published by the West on alternative medicine too, but as the links I provide show, Chinese research is systematically and generally of very low quality. If China cannot produce good research, what can we expect of other countries?
The language that I think most plausibly contains a disconnected scientific literature is Japanese.
The plural of "corpus" is "corpora". I don't say this to be pedantic, but because the word is quite lovely, and deserves to be used more.
Some time ago someone linked a paper indicating that there are benefits to fragmentation of academia by language barriers as less people are exposed to some kind of dominant view allowing them to come up with new ideas. One cited example was anthropology which had a Russian and an Anglosphere tradition.
I'd assume there not to be any major translation efforts as being a translator isn't as effective as publishing something of your own by far.
Publishing your own scientific paper brings you more rewards, but translating other person's article requires less time and less scientific skills (just enough to understand the vocabulary and follow the arguments).
If someone would pay me for doing it, I would probably love to have a job of translating scientific articles to my language. It would be much easier for me to translate dozen articles than to create one. And if I would only translate the articles that passed some filter, for example those published in peer-reviewed journals, I could probably translate the output of twenty or fifty scientists.
It seems like there could definitely be money in 'international' journals for different fields, which would aggregate credible foreign papers and translate them. Interesting that they don't seem to exist.
How effective would it be to use human expertise to translate just the contents pages of journals, with links to Google Translate for the bodies of the papers? Or perhaps use humans to also translate the abstracts?
Does anything like this exist already?
Idea that popped into my head: it might be straightforward to make a frontend for the arXiv that adds a "Translate this into" drop-down list to every paper's summary page. (Using the list could redirect the user to Google Translate, with the URL for the PDF automatically fed into the translator.) As far as I know no one has done this but I could be wrong.
This chain is so interesting. As a grad student I could translate some papers and make some decent money in such a hypothetical regime.
The Body Electric mentioned that the Soviets were ahead of the west in studying electrical fields in biology because (not sure of the date-- sometime before the seventies) electricity sounded to much like elan vital to the westerners.
Which Body Electric? I don't see it in Becker and Selden, but maybe I don't know what to look for.
Possibly this Body Electric. It's at least about the right subject, but I'd have swore I'd read it much earlier than 1998, and my copy (buried somewhere) probably had a purple cover.
The cover on the hardcover looks more familiar, and at least it's from 1985.
Wikipedia makes it sound like the right book.
Where were you searching? You had the authors right.
I looked at that book on google books. I searched for "Soviet," "elan," etc, and did not see the story you mentioned.
Added: Amazon says that the book uses these words a lot more than google says, but I didn't look at many hits.
That's interesting. I read your comment out of context and didn't know you were making a comment about the language. I agreed that I don't like thinking about electricity in animals (or more strongly, any coordinated magnetic phenomena, etc) because of this association. There is a similarity in the sounds, ("electrical" and "elan vital") but also the concepts are close in space ... perhaps the Soviets lacked this ugh field altogether.
I was using "sounded like" metaphorically. I assume they knew the difference in meaning, but were affected by the similarity of concepts and worry about their reputations.
I guessed that the Soviets were more willing to do the research because Marxism was kind of like weird science, so they were willing to look into weird science in general. However, this is just a guess. A more general hypothesis is that new institutions are more willing to try new things.
If you know English and Mandarin, you might make an academic career out of writing meta analysis of topics discussed in Mandarin research papers.
I am not professionally involved in these fields but I have read that among those who are there is a very jaundiced opinion of Chinese and Indian scientific research. If none of the following hold completely ignoring their publications is apparently a good heuristic; at least one foreign co-author or one who did their doctorate in the first world or an institution or author with a significant reputation. Living in China and having some minimal experience with the Chinese attitude to plagiarism/copying/research makes this seem plausible. I doubt anyone's missing anything by ignoring scientific articles published in Mandarin. I make no such claims for social sciences.