Associate Professor Tatsuya Amano & Professor Lynne Bowker will explore language barriers in science: from evidence generation to AI translation solutions for a more inclusive academic world.
Presentations
translatE project: understanding and overcoming language barriers in science
Language barriers can have serious implications for scientists, the science they produce, and how science is applied to addressing global challenges and communicated to the wider community. The translatE project applies scientific approaches to address this important, yet often overlooked challenge of transcending language barriers in science. This presentation will provide a brief overview of the project's outcomes, focusing on three types of language barriers: barriers to (i) the generation of scientific evidence; (ii) the global synthesis of evidence scattered across different languages; and (iii) the local application of English-language evidence.
Towards multilingual scholarly communication: How far can translation technologies take us?
The single-language model of scholarly communication creates inequities, but establishing a multilingual scholarly communication ecosystem also brings challenges. If all researchers publish and present in their own language, how can we discover and engage with each other’s work? Technologies such as neural machine translation (NMT) or AI tools based on large language models (LLMs) offer exciting possibilities, but they also have limitations. This presentation will consider some of the ways in which translation technologies are and could be used in scholarly communication, as well as offering some tips for improving machine translation literacy skills in this community.
About the presenters
Associate Professor Tatsuya Amano is a distinguished researcher at The University of Queensland's School of the Environment. His work primarily focuses on addressing the global biodiversity crisis by identifying and overcoming gaps in biodiversity information. He employs innovative modeling approaches to inform conservation initiatives and bridges the gap between research and practical implementation.
A key aspect of his research is the translatE project, funded by the Australian Research Council, which aims to transcend language barriers in environmental sciences. This project assesses the importance of non-English scientific knowledge, the impact of language barriers on decision-making, and devises solutions for effective information exchange across languages and cultures.
Professor Lynne Bowker is Full Professor and Canada Research Chair in Translation, Technologies and Society at Université Laval in Canada. A certified translator (FR-EN) with the Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes agréées du Québec, she teaches translation, terminology, corpus linguistics and translation tools. Her research interests lie at the intersection of language and computers, and she is currently motivated to understand how people outside the translation community are using automatic translation tools as part of the Machine Translation Literacy Project. Her recent publications include Machine Translation and Global Research (Emerald, 2019) and the fully open access De-mystifying Translation (Routledge, 2023).
