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Douglas_Knight comments on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.