The Tower of Babel. From the photo stream of tomatelá! on Flickr.com
Martin posted about the trouble of language discrepancy in scientific communication, and many have commented on the topic. There was another post on the similar topic on The Sceptical Chymist. I don’t know how different are German or French from English, but I do know Chinese is very different from any of these western Latin letters. The language problem in scientific communication in China is thus different from, if not worse than, Germany or France.
I believe Chinese students spend the most time on English compared with their counterparts in other non-English speaking countries. English classes starts from kindergarten, and many parents even give English lessons to their babies before they are born. Until the end of high-school study, all the grammar is taught. In almost every university, one cannot get his BS degree if he/she cannot pass the College English Test (CET) Band 4, and no opportunity of a good job after graduation if he/she cannot pass CET Band 6. Proficient oral and aural English increases the possibility of offers from big companies like P&G, GE, Dow, BP, etc.
And the irony is, you can do almost nothing with CET 4/6-leveled English – they are baby English! It is very hard for most Chinese students to achieve the level of TOEFL after CET Bend 6, not to mention GRE/GMAT. To do “good science” I think a level between TOEFL and GRE (close to TOEFL) is required. But if a Chinese student does not plan to study abroad he/she won’t devote any effort in English at all. We are severely lacking students that can view papers in English massively and write in that language fluently. Although lectures of most international journals said they won’t have you in trouble only because your bad English provided that the information is clearly conveyed. But if a CET Band 6 composition only requires 120 words, how could a student be possibly write the shortest letter required for publishing?
Therefore we have many journals in Chinese. Of course these journals are regarded lower class than international ones. Universities and institutes reward their professors by their numbers of publication on SCI indexed journals, and maybe with several levels according to the impact factors of the journal, e.g. extra money per publication on a IF>3 journal. Everybody wants to publish in English. Good scientists in China must be more proficient in English and are able to publish their work in the international journals. Some works just won’t appear in any Chinese journals. (I’m doing some pseudo-polyrotaxane, which is a very repeated work, but I still can’t find more than 10 Chinese papers in this field except some short reviews on other countries’ works.) China is now relying on Chinese scientists from abroad. I mean those who have worked for a while abroad and now return. They can cooperate with the global scientific community smoothly (you know, make jokes with you guys in a conference) and stay in the front of their fields. But they definitely won’t publish their breakthroughs on any Chinese journal.
The truth is we can’t know all the languages but we all have to communicate, so we have to choose one language as standard, which now seems to be English. But how about other languages? What roles should they play?
We don´t have to choose one language as standard. We are this complex network of people, each one speaking his small set of languages. Languages rise in popularity in time, but others may always come up.
I studied a bit of Japanese some years ago. This was mainly because I like Japanese comics and movies. I like Japanese martial arts too, I practice(d) Aikido for some years… When I got to college, it turned out I worked at the lab of a professor who did his doctoral studies in Japan, and still speaks some Japanese. He has some contacts there, and from time to time he helps students to go work there. There is one colleague of mine there right now.
This personal story is just to illustrate how this thing works. We end up learning foreign languages for many reasons. This learning is influenced by many factors, and influences many other things back again. We must not make this something that works from “top” to “down”...
I studied english too, and french, and I do agree it´s much easier to learn similar languages. I laugh when I see people concerned about the language problem in science, but regarding only european languages… The problem is much bigger!...
I think the only good way to lear a language is when you start to use it. If people have to read in english, they end up learning it. Same for chinese. People must learn naturally, just as languages become “standards” naturally…
As for the problem with international science, I don´t see why we can´t have journals publishing translations of some of their works. This is the XXI century! Why can´t we have lots of people translating articles?
If you think about it, people translating articles was always something important in science… The language problem is not new, and the figure of the translator has been crucial… Why do we think it this is strange today?...
To think mankind will converge to a language is naïve… And also that this language would be english just as it is spoken in the USA or UK. Other languages will always have their role, as long as we, spokers, keep using them and learning others…
I wouldalso like to say that we must never forget that fording people to talk in foreign languages is oppression. It´s cultural domination. When we talk about english becoming a “default” language (notice how I´m fording myself to use french terms…) we are talking about US and UK colonizing the planet. This must always be brought to the attention…
I would like to add several points.
1. GRE is difficult. Tons of American students (born, raised and educated in the US) got offer from Harvard, MIT, CalTech with a GRE subject less than 40%. But for Chinese or Indian students, without a 95% GRE it is very difficult to get into those Ivy Univ. A good/bad GRE score does not mean much.
2. I think we do not need to worry about the fact there are no high-profile Chinese journals. English is not an official language in Switzerland, for example, but Swiss scientific journals are printed in English as well (of course changed from German in the old time). On the other hand in order to make Chinese journal more “high-profile”, certainly need to attract first-class scientists to review, read and publish them. Many Chinese journals are changed to English version with both Chinese-English abstracts, and published by British or American publishers.