Imperial oppression

Quoting the start of an editorial and some additional references for
the interested:

"How would you cope if you had to describe complex ideas, convey fine
nuances in data interpretation, and express your most creative
thoughts in an alien language with a totally different vocabulary and
an illogical structure? Not only that, you would have to do this while
many of your colleagues and competitors, who also act as the
gatekeepers of your subject, are happily working away in their mother
tongue.

Hardly a level playing field, is it? And yet this is precisely the
situation in which most researchers, teachers, students, and even
schoolchildren find themselves. They might speak any one of more than
6,000 languages used in the world today, but if they don't communicate
in English, then the sciences, especially the life sciences, are
closed to them. This generates huge disconnects -- make that
discrimination -- in information sharing and opportunity. It's
something that the Anglophone science community is, at best, unaware
of and, at worst, happy to embrace in these competition-dominated
times. Hardly the image of international harmony that most scientists
pay lip service to, and there is growing awareness and resentment of
the issue among non-Anglophones.

Little has been done to assess the impact of monolingualism in
science, let alone deal with it, but a session at the AAAS meeting in
February at least laid out the issues. The participants in that panel
have been kind enough to supply me with their slides, which can be
accessed at www.the-scientist.com/languagebarrier.

There are two broad issues: fairness and efficiency. The first can't
be disputed; it is patently unjust to force the majority to work in a
nonnative tongue. Aside from the individual struggles of scientists to
make themselves understood, there are also institutional biases. For
example, the various world rankings of research institutions include
only English-language publications in their assessments. That
Anglophone institutions will fill the top spots is a built-in bias in
the process.

Is monolingualism also having an impact on efficiency? Most
certainly..."
etc.

Editorial:
http://www.the-scientist.com/2008/4/1/13/1/
Papers:
http://www.the-scientist.com/languagebarrier/
http://www.the-scientist.com/2008/4/1/13/101/
Slide shows:
http://www.the-scientist.com/downloads/Vergara.ppt
http://tinyurl.com/67etw8

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