Supporting Language Diversity in Scholarship

This guide presents resources for overcoming language barriers in scholarship, including choosing and using machine translation tools, preparing multi-lingual or translation-ready publications, and participating in scholarship with empathy.

Recommended reading

Overcoming Language Barriers in Academia: Machine Translation Tools and a Vision for a Multilingual Future

Machine translation and global research : towards improved machine translation literacy in the scholarly community

These works and others suggest some interconnected actions we can take to support language inclusion in scholarship, as searchers, authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors.

Publish Open Access

Most Open Access publications bear a Creative Commons license, which allows the creation of translations and other derivative works. 

Cal Poly-provided options to publish Open Access for free.  

Translate Abstracts

"A concerted effort toward providing open-access, human-verified, and high-quality translations of abstracts in scientific journals would significantly contribute toward generating the data necessary for training machine translation systems."

Steigerwald E, Ramírez-Castañeda V, Brandt DYC, Báldi A, Shapiro JT, Bowker L, Tarvin RD. Overcoming Language Barriers in Academia: Machine Translation Tools and a Vision for a Multilingual Future. Bioscience. 2022 Aug 3;72(10):988-998. doi: 10.1093/biosci/biac062. PMID: 36196221; PMCID: PMC9525128.

Translate Full Papers

When to consider translating your paper into another language.  

Publish Plain Language Summaries

"A contribution that all researchers and journals can make, regardless of their native language, is to prepare a plain language summary that is both reader friendly and translation friendly (Bowker and Ciro 2019) "

• Bowker L, Ciro JB.. 2019. Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community. Emerald. [Google Scholar]

Tips for plain language summaries

Free book on writing translation-ready text 

*Connection*: These plain language tips also support research reproducibility by reducing linguistic ambiguities. Consider an example from the book, “disconnect port and drain lines”.  Does this reference port lines or not? 

Peer Review with Empathy

"What could easily be perceived as a “problem” that non-Anglophone researchers must solve by improving their English could perhaps be more helpfully recast as a challenge that all members of the scholarly scientific community can work to address."
Bowker, Lynne, and CIro, Jairo Buitrago. Machine Translation and Global Research : Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community, Emerald Publishing Limited, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/calpoly/detail.action?docID=5754816. 

• Romero-Olivares AL. 2019. Reviewers, don't be rude to nonnative English speakers. Science (3 October 2019). [Google Scholar]
• Mavrogenis AF, Quaile A, Scarlat MM.. 2020. The good, the bad and the rude peer-review. International Orthopaedics 44: 413–415. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Journals Supporting Language Diversity

Paper recommending journal policies to support language diversity

List of environmental science journals committed to addressing language barriers