[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.