Agriculture and Environmental Sciences Librarian
Ways to Support Language Inclusion 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
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.
Recommended actions
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 et al., 2022)."
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).
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 and Ciro 2019).
Further reading
- Romero-Olivares AL. 2019. Reviewers, don't be rude to nonnative English speakers. Science (3 October 2019).
- Mavrogenis AF, Quaile A, Scarlat MM.. 2020. The good, the bad and the rude peer-review. International Orthopaedics 44: 413–415.
Journals Supporting Language Diversity
- Paper recommending journal policies to support language diversity
- Toolsuite suggesting actions publishers can take to support multilingual scholarly publishing.
- List of environmental science journals committed to addressing language barriers
