[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.