Re: Imperial oppression

On Apr 15, 8:06 am, mb <azyth...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.

This piece appears to be addressed to biological scientists. While
some of them may possibly be unaware of this fact, do you really think
this is news to linguists, or readers of sci.lang?


Hardly a level playing field, is it?

I'm old enough to remember when "level playing field" was a rallying
cry for free-market economists and their political followers.

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 is a wild exaggeration. I'm sure schoolchildren around the world
are being taught elementary biology (and mathematics and geography) in
dozens if not hundreds of different languages. Not in every single one
of the 6,000, of course. And the further you pursue your studies the
narrower the range of languages gets. Nevertheless, professional
scientific communication (journal articles, monographs, conferences)
continues to take place in French, Spanish, Japanese and other
languages.

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 atwww.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.

"Unfair" maybe, like life's unfair. The position of English in the
world means that the majority have to do some learning (and not just
in science) that native speakers of English don't. It would be
"unjust" only if there were some ready available alternative.

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.

If this is true, it merely confirms the stupidity of such "rankings".
They have been dreamed up, and are taken seriously, mainly by ed-biz
administrators with degrees in management and suchlike.

In fact this whole article seems to treat science as just another
industry, in which certain people are not getting a fair chance at
careers and advancement. If you want to look at it that way, the most
obvious way of improving the situation would be to improve the
teaching and learning of English around the world. But then that would
probably be seen by some as "Imperial oppression".

Ross Clark



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.ppthttp://tinyurl.com/67etw8

[file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/mbeer/Local%20Settings/Temporary
%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/SRYNKRKL/Ammon%5B1%5D.ppt#267,11,Slide
11]

.

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