#multilingualresearch — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #multilingualresearch, aggregated by home.social.
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Update. Alan Colin-Arce has written an excellent slide deck on multilingual publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
https://sisu.ut.ee/wp-content/uploads/sites/903/Humanities-and-SS-Commons.pdf -
Update. Alan Colin-Arce has written an excellent slide deck on multilingual publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
https://sisu.ut.ee/wp-content/uploads/sites/903/Humanities-and-SS-Commons.pdf -
Update. Alan Colin-Arce has written an excellent slide deck on multilingual publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
https://sisu.ut.ee/wp-content/uploads/sites/903/Humanities-and-SS-Commons.pdf -
Update. Alan Colin-Arce has written an excellent slide deck on multilingual publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
https://sisu.ut.ee/wp-content/uploads/sites/903/Humanities-and-SS-Commons.pdf -
Update. Alan Colin-Arce has written an excellent slide deck on multilingual publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
https://sisu.ut.ee/wp-content/uploads/sites/903/Humanities-and-SS-Commons.pdf -
Update. "Many [non-native writers of English] cannot confidently judge whether their original expression is better than the AI's suggestion. Some do not even suspect that their original phrasing might carry nuance worth preserving…Thus, AI does not affect all writers equally. Native speakers tend to use AI to clarify their writing while preserving their voice. Non-native speakers often use AI in a fundamentally different way: their voice is replaced by a standardized, fluent, but impersonal tone. In many cases, they do not even notice that this has happened. This difference is unfair, yet largely invisible."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jep.70455 -
Update. For scholars with English as a second language, "#AI tools are described…not as shortcuts, but as equalizers. They reduce time-to-submission, lower financial burdens, and allow researchers to focus on ideas rather than articulation. For early-career scholars and those in resource-limited institutions, AI-based language assistance often replaces services that were previously inaccessible or prohibitively expensive. Yet they are not sure if the way they are using AI is permissible."
https://katinamagazine.org/content/article/open-knowledge/2026/will-ai-level-linguistic-playing-field-for-researchers -
Update. #AI tools are mostly trained on #English language literature and reflect the cultural assumptions of that literature. When they deliver their results in another language, the translation masks the "epistemological persistence" of those assumptions.
Primary source:
https://www.academia.edu/150614492/Epistemological_Persistence_in_Multilingual_AI_The_Illusion_of_Locality_in_Large_Language_Models -
Update. "Beginning February 11, 2026, #arXiv will require that all submissions have a full English-language version, either as the original language or as an included translation."
https://blog.arxiv.org/2025/11/21/upcoming-policy-change-to-non-english-language-paper-submissions/Coverage of the new policy in Nature.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00229-0 -
Update. "For the 1990–2023 period, we find that only Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish have expanded at a faster pace than English [in academic publishing]… Social sciences and humanities are the least English-dominated fields… Policies recognizing the value of both national-language and English-language publications have had a concrete impact on the distribution of languages in the global field of scholarly communication."
https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.70055 -
Update. It's rare to see a journal editorial call for #MultilingualResearch. Here's one from _Applied and Environmental Microbiology_, published by the American Society of Microbiology.
https://doi.org/10.1128/aem.02229-25Language barriers "do more than prevent access to opportunities. They cement unfair assumptions about scientific competence and preferentially amplify voices that are proficient, or perceived to be proficient, in the dominant language, shaping scientific discourse in narrow and exclusive ways. This editorial explores how linguistic bias sustains professional hierarchies and restricts scientific progress. It also highlights our journal’s initiatives to overcome language-based barriers in publishing and foster equitable participation in scientific exchange."
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Update. New from #COAR (@coar_repositories): "This paper explores the concept of #semantic #multilingual #search: an emerging approach that retrieves information by meaning rather than by exact wording, enabling users to search in any supported language and discover relevant work across all languages…When you ask a question in your language, the entire world should have a chance to understand and respond."
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Update. "Multilingualism in science…expands the participation and dialogue among diverse communities of scientists and influences stakeholders who use science to address urgent global issues. [But] systematic and sustained implementation of multilingual scholarly communication and peer-reviewed publishing is cumbersome for journal management platforms, research teams, and editorial boards…This Research Note…proposes the first statement of the _Journal of Disaster Studies_ (JDS) on inclusive multilingualism."
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/971123 -
Update. "A scholarly communication ecosystem with one dominant language presents numerous inequities. Implementing multilingualism is complex and there is no single strategy to achieve it. Rather, multilingualism can take different forms, and small steps taken by different actors can add up to increase linguistic diversity. This commentary unpacks some of the complexities involved in multilingual scholarly communication and offers some concrete recommendations for moving forward."
https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/cjils/article/view/22292 -
Update. "For the 1990-2023 period, we find that only Indonesian, Portuguese and Spanish have expanded at a faster pace than English. Country-level analyses show that this trend is due to the growing strength of the Latin American and Indonesian academic circuits. Our results also confirm…that social sciences and humanities are the least English-dominated fields. Our findings suggest that policies recognizing the value of both national-language and English-language publications have had a concrete impact on the distribution of languages in the global field of scholarly communication."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21100 -
Update. For research in #Brazil "indexing biases disproportionately affect researchers focusing on locally relevant topics through articles that are written in Portuguese. Given women's overrepresentation in this group, our findings illustrate how indexing biases contribute to gender inequalities in science."
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391183750_Occluded_Topics_The_hidden_half_of_Brazilian_research -
Update. See the Linguistic Society of America (#LSA) Statement Against Designating English as the Official Language.
https://www.lsadc.org/content.asp?admin=Y&contentid=468"The United States has always been a multilingual country, and this gives it strength…Citizens of the US and of all democracies inevitably have different linguistic ways of navigating their lives, and enforced monolingualism never achieves national unity…'Official English' policies do not improve economic prospects for those who arrive in the US speaking another language, nor do they improve communication for those who live in multilingual communities…Supporting and promoting multilingualism makes a nation stronger, not weaker."
#Multilingualism #MultilingualResearch #Trump #USPol #USPolitics
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Update. A profile of Japanese biologist Tatsuya Amano and his work to foster #MultilingualResearch and spotlight discrimination against non-fluent speakers of English.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00157-5
(#paywalled) -
Update. "Under the pressure of English as the lingua franca for research publication, local journals have changed their language policies for survival. While some discontinued their local-language editions and became English journals, others resorted to bilingual publishing through translation…[The] shift to bilingual publishing [by journals based in #Spain] increases the proportion of international contributions and widens the geographical distribution of contributing countries."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1665 -
Update. "Multilingual publishing has been an ongoing and documented practice in SSH for many years, with numerous studies demonstrating the benefits of publishing research in multiple languages. However, there has been relatively little research into the extent to which multilingual publishing is practised in STEM. This chapter aims to address this gap in the literature and demonstrate that multilingual publishing is also visible in STEM fields."
https://books.google.com/books?id=1eFBEQAAQBAJ&newbks=0&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA151&hl=en&source=newbks_fb#v=onepage&q&f=false -
Update. "Communicating all research in one single language means that language shapes the research too. Language shapes what is possible to express, contextualize, or reveal…Privileging the English language in scholarly communication marginalizes and disadvantages researchers who are not first-language English speakers, or not English-language speakers at all."
https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/6258/ -
Update. "English-only journals have historically dominated the field [of #LIS. But] a significant number of multilingual journals have been indexed in Scopus over the past two decades. The 42 identified multilingual journals span 25 countries and encompass 18 languages…The study also uncovered disparities in journal metrics and rankings, with multilingual journals consistently scoring lower than their English-only counterparts."
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/09610006241285510 -
Update. A trilingual editor of an English-language journal talks about how to recognize and publish good research submitted in weak English by scientists whose first language is not English.
https://ject.edpsciences.org/articles/ject/full_html/2024/03/ject240024s/ject240024s.html -
Update. Sorry I didn't see this sooner. Yesterday #COARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) hosted a webinar on #multilingualism and language biases in research #assessment.
https://vastuullinentiede.fi/en/events/coara-wg-webinar-multilingualism-and-language-biases-research-assessment -
Update. The new issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing (Vol 27, No 1) is devoted to Multilingual Publishing and Scholarship.
https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/issue/262/info/ -
Update. "#OpenAlex exhibits a far more balanced linguistic coverage than #WoS. However, language metadata is not always accurate, which leads OpenAlex to overestimate the place of English while underestimating that of other languages."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.10633 -
Update. "This emphasis of publishing in 'international' (i.e., English-language) journals has multiple consequences for non-native English speakers, including problems with having the quality of their English reviewed over the academic content of their work and
limited access to scientific research for those who do not speak English."
https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/4847/ -
Update. "The preeminence of English as the lingua franca in global science has led to English-dominant publication practices, even in non-English-speaking countries. We examine the complex dynamics of language use in scientific publications in #China…The findings underscore the risk of underestimating China’s scientific output by only counting English-language publications."
https://academic.oup.com/rev/article-abstract/doi/10.1093/reseval/rvae036/7746712 -
Update. "Multilingual Data Science: Ten Tips to Translate Science and Tech Content"
https://datasciencebydesign.org/blog/multilingual-data-scienceOne nice tip I haven't seen before: If you write a glossary to accompany your research, make it a bilingual or multilingual glossary.
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@kdnyhan
It can only help!FWIW, see my thread on #MultilingualResearch.
https://fediscience.org/@petersuber/110803847506509205 -
Update. From 670 #OpenAccess journals published in #Africa, "only 57 journals allow publication in languages other than English [#LOTE]. From these journals, between 2010 and 2020, only 26 articles appeared in an African language. The Google Scholar site reports the highest citation for articles written in the aforementioned African languages is one."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14790718.2024.2369172 -
Update. "This paper analyses the attitudes of Polish linguists towards English for research publication…[The dominance of English contributes] to the sense of disadvantage associated primarily with manifold costs incurred by publishing in English."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1475158524000717
(#paywalled) -
Update. Recent work on #AI summaries is mostly monolingual, focusing on English. "In this paper, we consequently explore how state-of-the-art neural abstract summarization models based on a multilingual encoder–decoder architecture can be used to enable cross-lingual extreme summaries of scholarly texts."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-023-00373-2 -
Update. "We first introduce #translingualism and #ELF [English as a lingua franca] as equally legitimate multilingual theories. Next, we identify [their similarities and differences]…Finally, we lay out a vision for how this transdisciplinary, collaborative dialogue can help realize more equitable #multilingualism."
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/eduling-2023-0012/html -
Update. The Confederation of #OpenAccess #Repositories (#COAR) just released an important set of recommendations on managing multilingual and non-English language content in #OA repositories.
https://www.coar-repositories.org/news-updates/managing-multilingual-and-non-english-language-content-in-repositories/ -
The interview also has a longish section on the problem of #MultilingualResearch and the question how differences among the #disciplines affect the progress of OA.