Well this is a bit off topic but I was going to mention this in the thread about the last live meeting:
It is important to at least understand as many languages as possible. At first one would think that meanwhile this is not important in technology/engeneering and medicine/natural sciences, since almost all papers are published in English, but the longer I am involved with open source photography software the more I realize that nevertheless it is important there too. To give a few examples: Aureliensā youtube tutorial about Color Balanace RGB, Jaquesās RT demo at our last meeting; I donāt want to praise myself but my article about darktable that appeared in December in ct has received positive feedback even from developers; recently I published an article about Zotero in another German computer journal - it was translated into English and will appear in an - I think American computer journal, however, they left out the most important part about how to edit citation styles and create new ones; so, if you want to know how to do that, you need to understand German; the only youtube tutorials that exist about ART are in French afik; Etc. etc.
In the humanities, it is natural that one has to understand many languages. If you specialize on Mozart, there is no question that you have to learn German. Cultures are always national. I am not a racist but itās a good thing that not everything is always in English and that (national) cultures donāt die. According to my experience especially French and German should not be underestimated. But I bet there are whole Russian and Japanese and Spanish and Chinese and Indian worlds that we donāt know about. I guess there are also French and Spanish linux journals although I have never seen one. What about Arabic? So probably there is a lot of excellent documentation about darktable etc. that most users/developers donāt know about.
What are your experiences in this respect? Is it important to understand many languages for engeneers and computers scientists?
Side note: I have not specialized on Italian art as a student because I have not learned Italian at school. Meanwhile I think that I could write a paper about Italian art even though I hardly understand Italian. So it is possible, it is not 100% necessary but it does not hurt. On the other hand, I know for a fact that there are also important papers in Spanish and Italian about Dutch art.
The sooner there are seamless translation tools for sure the better. Those ART tutorials look quite good by the content creator Carafife . I have tried Googleās translation but its not very good and its distracting to read and to try and follow.
For me I often learn what I need to apply not from a tutorial on a specific piece of software but from one done on the exact aspect I am looking to understand and its often in some different software or just from a good presenter of the material. So access to all possible content would be so wonderful.
One thing with software demonstration/learning might be that even if you get over the hurdle of the spoken language for example if Google was perfect you would still also have to manage the UI and so quickly recognize that component as well.
I am with you on this. Can you only image what great talent and knowledge translation is floating around out there and its just blocked up by the language barrierā¦
One of the reasons i wanted to get involved the darktable project was that it would push me to improve my French. Another of my hobbies is Amateur Radio, and here German has been quite useful to know, with many interesting presentations being written for local radio clubs in German. Also, the Japanese produced some specification in Japanese that only ever partly got translated into English, and so referring back to the original Japanese documents is quite enlightening.
Unfortunately my Chinese is at a too low level to be useful for anything beyond simple travel interactions in China, and with Russian the only thing I know is the alphabet, which is only useful to pick out English loan words. I often wonder what I am missing out on not knowing those two languages, but language learning is so time consuming and there is so little timeā¦
I suppose I should add, if you work in Japan, knowing Japanese is extremely useful. Very often, due to costs and time, technical documents donāt get translated, or only get translated using machine translation, and this can sometimes be misleading. It may well be true in other countries as well, but Japan was one country where I really felt this.
@paperdigits Could you split this language and culture discussion? It is very interesting and would be a pity if it were lost in a now 246 post thread. Thanks!
In the humanities, there are sometimes funny things as far as languages and translations are concerned: a few years ago there was an exhibition about the early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling in I think in Rome. The exhibition catalogue was only published in Italian. However, most of the authors of the catalogue were American and Dutch, I think one of them was Italian. So all essays except the one in Italian were translated into Italian, even though most of them were originally in English. I think one of the papers was in Dutch.
The other thing: I think that the reason for the fact that the Russian and Chinese Covid vaccines are not allowed in the EU is not that there are not enough studies and documentation about them. The studies are probably there, but they are not in English.
This topis is VERY interesting on several levelsā¦
In my experience Iād say that even rudimentary understanding of different language brings certain robustness to thought process in terms of language that helps with better formulation of thoughts as well as better resilience against language tricks (eg. something a āguruā might say will sound profound in English but itās a silly gibberish in say Polish or other language not sharing common roots with English).
If you know 3 languages that do not share common root and are able to think and express thoughts in those 3 languages, then there is little chance that your thought process will get hoodwinked by some language features or idioms
Being able to read/hear texts from different languages also help with perspectives.
Interesting points Anna, and as a Dutch person myself, itās cool to see youāve specialized in Netherlandish art!
Language barriers are a very real thing, with very real problems. If you can somehow reduce the barriers, it helps a lot with understanding each other, just like @johnny-bit explains. Otherwise, my perception is that the prevailing sentiment is āwhat I canāt understand, I donāt (want to) knowā. On the largest scale this can be seen in geopolitics where plenty of countries thrive by individualism and nationalism, trying to root out things that are not ānormalā.
The scientific community is predominantly English-speaking, but that was German in the past. So things may change. And during my PhD I encountered plenty of Chinese papers which only had an English translated title, so I couldnāt use them. I can imagine this works the other way around tooā¦
And of course you have similar things when you look at social media and maybe the internet in general with separate Chinese, Russian and American (English) sections.
But this is not so different from the past few hundred years, where the aristocracy in Europe spoke French, and English was the tongue of the commoners. And further back, Latin was the official language in the Roman empire (and to some extent Greek as well), but of course the empire was large enough that the common folk spoke many different tongues.
And that works. As long as you want to be able to communicate, you can learn how to do so with each other. And if you canāt put it into words, thereās always art
One cannot be divorced from the geopolitical realities and power dynamics within and relating to any pursuit. Makes the world a lot more interesting in historic terms, but totally gets in the way of peace and stability; case in point, China vs their COVID researchers who wanted to make a difference, which has contributed to the global turmoil we have today. It isnāt just China but the world. We tend to dismiss and mock our frenemies but fail to examine and change ourselves. I didnāt really want to talk about this but my point is that individuals are beholden to others, usually negatively. To round it off, learning new languages and cultures is one step in the right direction. It isnāt just about getting oneās way; it is about understanding the other and getting out of the us vs them mentality.
There is a bit of research suggesting that the biggest misunderstandings occur between two speakers of closely related languages. Presumably the issue is that speakers can assume they know what the other is saying, and end up talking at cross purposes.
For languages that are much further apart, speakers know that translation may not be exact, and can ask for further confirmation.
On a different note regarding PhD research papers - in my day there was a thriving industry in translating obscure journal articles in say Russian or Chinese and plagiarizing into fresh English thesis content.
