[Staple_Diet]

>It's regrettable that research had to be published in a specific language for scientists to leverage.

Not really. ~70 million people read Italian. Billions read English. The biggest journals are English language. Most of Europe learn English. Chinese academics learn to write in English, and English is the official language of India.

It'd be regrettable if they had to publish in Science/Nature to get noticed, but PLOS One is pretty open.

[pvaldes]

> ~70 million people read Italian. Billions read English.

It does not matter. Researchers interested in old Rome or in old canoes will be able to find it. All articles have abstracts in English and academics do an extensive use of keywords and publishing databases.

I had to translate a very old paper from Dutch once, before to cite it, and it didn't was an unsurmountable problem with the correct motivation. Dictionaries were made for this.

[nradov]

A dictionary is only one small piece of translation. Dutch is linguistically very similar to English so it's relatively easy to learn and translate. Something like Russian is far more difficult because it comes from a different language family and uses a different writing system. There is a treasure trove of Russian journal articles which have never been properly translated and represent something like "scientific dark matter". LLM translation tools can help a lot to make those more accessible.

[dekhn]

The dutch were in an excellent position at the beginning of the quantum revolution- they could read and translate english and german, and played a key role in sharing ideas between the two centers (Berlin and London) which were not highly aware of the other's progress.

[swores]

I don't think they were complaining that the world didn't read the Italian research, just that it's a shame that people from non-English speaking countries have to either be good enough at a second language to write their research in English, or need to waste time waiting for someone else to translate. Along with hope that machine translation can fix this problem and remove hurdles for international collaboration.

[Staple_Diet]

It's near impossible to work as a professional academic without learning English well enough to publish in it. Furthermore, in many fields you need to move countries during your academic journey and learn a language. For example my previous PI was Spanish (Catalonian actually) but did his PhD in Paris, so he needed to learn three languages in addition to his native tongue. Other lab members were French, Italian and German, all again having to have learnt English so they could each communicate with each other but also publish. The international collaboration is already there, and it's aided, not hindered, by the use of English as a common tongue.

It's a two way street as well, if an academic can't read English than they effectively cut themselves off from 95% of the research in their field, and most certainly the most impactful research. Lastly, most journals offer paid translation services and a lot of Universities will similarly offer a service, so it's almost a moot point.

[swores]

I appreciate that a lot of people successfully get round the issue of learning English, but isn't this submission a direct example that there are still cases where language is barrier? And it's not like it's a one off case, surely there's huge amounts of research published in languages like Chinese, and probably smaller amounts in various fields published in the languages of pretty much any country by people who want to work on science even if they don't want to learn English?

I'm not arguing that it's high on the list of things that could be improved in the world of research, just that it's something that would be worth improving if and when computers are good enough to remove this friction.