[blululu]

In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.

At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.

[thrance]

*Chinese academics are far more bilingual than English-speaking ones.

Here in France, every academic I know, and I know quite a lot of them, are all perfectly fluent in English. Most of what they write is in English, or at the very least translated into it.

[stavros]

> Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones.

In what sense, since most of the western world doesn't have English as a native language, and many US researchers were born in other countries?

[blululu]

Sorry poor turn of phrase. I meant this in the sense of the publication language. Yes - most academics everywhere speak a few languages.

[xeonmc]

Chinese language publications may eventually serve the role of rapid communications, but for important results it will always be in English due to their ”trophy culture”.

[blululu]

That makes sense. The same trend is already happening in the west with Arxiv and Bioarxiv. Neither is as prestigious for the purpose of a lot of facility politics/rankings but in an active field both are more meaningful markers of the cutting edge than prestige publications like nature. I imagine these journals will retain their function as markers of prestige even as most of the community’s research output happens in more informal channels.