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by informatimago
3988 days ago
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Of course nowadays it's easier to get translations. But remember that it is a trick that worked for secret war communications during WWII, not so long ago, when the US used Navajo people to design a code that stayed unbroken, because essentially, nobody in Germany knew the Navajo language. Then we can assume that the NSA can understand Russian, French or Spanish as well as English. But recently they couldn't understand Arabic and Persian good enough (perhaps this has changed now). What other language is still a deaf spot for them? ;-) But this is a more general thing than just the idiom. You have to take in consideration the whole culture and "ecosystem". If you develop a body of knowledge in a given language, (from which you derive written theses in this language, and scientific papers in this language, and patents in this language), you have essentially built a conceptual framework that is isolated from the other languages, and until translations or explanations are exchanged, any sentence having a meaning in this framework will be untranslatable, even if you can translate "word-by-word" because the concepts won't transport. At this point, this is a processus that can only be performed by humans, as you can see from eg. the failures of Google Translate (and don't try to translate Spanish to English or French to English, those are easy translations for Google! Try less frequent language pairs). |
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It's been done before (Germany during the Third Reich, Russia during the Cold War), but even though the scientists involved did some really good work, they couldn't do as much as they could have in cooperation with the rest of the world (a lot of work done abroad was duplicated).
There's a reason science has always been so international - it just makes the research process a lot quicker and more effective. And a common language helps enormously. In the Middle Ages (and for quite some time after) the lingua franca of science was Latin. That changed around the 18th-19th century, when a lot of work started being done in local languages (Mendel wrote his findings up in German, Darwin in English, Pasteur presumably in French, etc.) This meant that to stay on top of your field as a scientist you had to understand all the important languages (English, French, German, some Italian and Russian). After WWII, English became the new Latin so to speak, and we had a predominant language again.
So to sum up, if you are prepared to risk scientific isolation, go ahead and do your own thing in your own language - if a nation state is set on doing something like this, it will manage at an academic level. But in today's globalised world, I doubt whether any commercial/industrial players would be able or even willing to pull it off.