Takeaways from teaching the Intro to Translation for Non-translators at FSCI2025

From July 22nd to 24th, a team from Translate Science taught an online introduction to the basics of translation (course E07) at the FORCE11 summer school FSCI2025. The course, though only 3 hours in time altogether, covered quite a lot of ground.

The first day (slides) outlined what translation is… and also what it is not! Participants were invited to reflect on some common misperceptions about translation (e.g. translation is about word-for-word substitution; any bilingual person can translate; AI will replace translators) before discussing how context, culture, and domain knowledge are all needed to effectively translate a message, rather than just words. Also, in order to appropriately formulate the message, a lot of research into linguistic conventions, terminology and other factors is required – especially for highly specialized content such as research.

The second day (slides) participants learned about various online tools for research, such as the WIPO multilingual terminology portal, but also to lesser known tools such as Diatopix which displays the use of terminological variants according to world regions for the languages English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The latter point highlights a general problem with regard to science translation: If aimed at a world-wide population, how should science translation handle such variation?

The third day (slides) was devoted to the topic of machine translation. The presentation highlighted some general problems of artificial ‘intelligence’, e. g., that it is often hard to figure out which parameters a machine actually uses for a decision. A notable case with regard to machine translation is that of gender bias: When translating from a language with little or no gender marking into a language with more gender marking, stereotypes often show in the result. While a physics professor will almost certainly be translated into the male word for ‘professor’ in German, a gender studies professor is more likely to be rendered with the female variant for ‘professor’.

For the course organisers, the summer school was very rewarding because the participants in course (and the event as a whole) are mainly library and information science (LIS) professionals, a group of stakeholders that Translate Science hasn’t yet addressed to the same extent as scientists. Interesting questions that were raised included how to make publications more attractive for and relevant to translation, or how to deal with copyright issues, as well as multilingual metadata.

But it wasn’t all work and no play… participants were challenged to adapt the short phrase “Translation FUNdamentals” into another language, and they rose to the challenge with creative flair!

It was heartening to see the degree to which LIS professionals care about and are interested in engaging with translation in the context of scholarly communication. Translate Science intends to build on the lessons learned from the course and to look for more opportunities to connect with the LIS community. We’re excited that our proposal has been accepted to offer an expanded, hybrid version of the workshop at the January 2026 FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI), part of Charleston Conference Asia.

A course on Translation at the 2025 FSCI Scholarly Communication Institute – brought to you by Translate Science!

It’s no secret that, for several decades now, the world of scientific research and publication has been dominated by the use of English as a lingua franca. Translate Science aims to promote multilingual open science. As part of this, it seeks to foster an appreciation for and to support the development of competences in translation for those who want to contribute to a more multilingual science.

In line with this, Translate Science applied to hold a course at the FORCE11 Scholarly Communication Institute (FSCI). FORCE11 is a community of people with various roles in scholarly communication that aims “to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology.” The theme of FSCI 2025 is “Working towards Open Scholarship in the Age of Intelligent Automation”, and this year’s edition offers a variety of online courses on how digital tools can aid in scientific workflows. While translation is a field that deals with language and culture, it is also highly technologized, with a wealth of digital resources and tools to support translation processes. This makes it a perfect topic to explore as part of FCSI 2025!

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Seeking panelists to share how their multilingual open science has been affected by US Federal policy shifts

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Does your work include aspects of multilingual and open science? Have you been affected by the current policy and funding paradigm in the United States? Please note that you do not need to be based in the US or have directly received funding from a US institution to have been affected by the current policies. The core contributors at Translate Science are seeking folks who can shed light on the challenges and opportunities of our current situation so that we can all better understand how to orient our efforts towards a more just scientific enterprise. If you know of others who may be interested please share this post with them

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Summary of our September Panel: Humberto and Devang

The Core Contributors want Translate Science to be a community of interest around the broad issues concerning multilingualism in science. To achieve this we hope that by amplifying diverse ideas and experiences via the medium of an online panel discussion we can help others understand how they too may have important perspectives to share. Our intention is to maintain a conversation that connects folks across disciplines so they can better advocate for multilingual science from their positions.

On September 3rd we had our second panel with 2 wonderful guests: Humberto Debat (tenured Research Scientists, Institute of Plant Pathology Center for Agricultural Research, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria) and Devang Mehta (tenure-track Assistant Professor, Department of Biosystems, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). We invited Devang because one of our core contributors Carolina Quezada worked with him through the ecrLife editorial team where they used the platform to draw attention to issues in research culture. Humberto was invited by searching our mailing list for candidates and we thought their work on PanLingua was very aligned with Translate Science.

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Panel discussion on September 3rd at 16:00 UTC

Being a part of the Translate Science community can mean many different things because the work of increasing multilingualism within the scientific enterprise by necessity engages diverse actors working in science. In our second panel discussion, the Translate Science core contributors are seeking to help our wider community understand different approaches by providing a platform for folks to share how they advance open and multilingual science in their current role. We hope that this event can shed some light on the issues that affect researchers in different regions and serve to bring together others engaging with them.

In this iteration of our Translate Science community meeting we will be featuring two researchers in biology

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Summary of our April panel: Lynne and Emma

By Carolina Quezada on behalf of the Translate Science core contributors

What is the role of scientists and translators in making science more accessible? How are scientists advancing in open and multilingual science? What is the best use we of machine translation tools?

The Translate Science community is seeking to provide a platform to have open discussions about these interesting topics with a panel of diverse actors working in science. On April 8th we had our first panel with 2 spectacular guests:  Lynne Bowker (Full Professor at the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa and incoming Canada Research Chair in Translation, Technologies, and Society at Université Laval) and Emma Steigerwald (postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz). We learned about their work after reading a paper they co-authored on the potential of machine translation tools to foster a more multilingual future for science. Our discussion with them was a great opportunity to start showing our wider community the type of work that we intend to support.

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Translate Science April 2024 Panel

You’re invited to a panel discussion on April 22, 2024 at 16:00 UTC

Being a part of the Translate Science community can mean many different things because the work of increasing multilingualism within the scientific enterprise by necessity engages diverse actors working in science. In our first panel discussion, the Translate Science core contributors are seeking to help our wider community understand different approaches by providing a platform for folks to share how they advance open and multilingual science in their current role. We hope that this event can shed some light on the issues that we care about and serve to bring together others engaging with them.

In this iteration of our Translate Science community meeting we will be featuring Lynne Bowker and Emma Steigerwald.

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Caveats of machine translation

Translation tools (often referred to as CAT tools for ‘computer aided translation’) are a great means of streamlining some of the elements of a translation process, such as checking terminology or retrieving existing translations (so-called Translation Memories). Modern versions of these tools allow for a web-based, collaborative translation, giving collaborators such possibilities as revising and/or commenting proposed translations, evaluating existing translations or adding machine translation (henceforth MT) support. Modern MT systems are based on artificial neural networks, which have boosted quality considerably since roughly the mid-2010s.

CAT tools, with or without added machine translation support, have been studied from various angles. While they in general increase efficiency and often ease the task of translation as translators do not have to start from scratch, there are some caveats to be kept in mind when working with them. Here are some of the more important ones.

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Theoretical background to translation

This is the first of two blog posts with general notes on how to approach the task of translating science, touching upon the most prevalent basic notions and advice relevant to the task. The two main points presented in this and the upcoming post are (a) an introduction into a present-day functionalist view of translation which provides for a wide range of purpose-driven strategic translation options and (b) key caveats when making use of digital support tools for translation including machine translation. These general notes are meant for people who read academic texts at a postgraduate level and have experience with scholarly publishing, but may have little to no experience in translation. As technological tools are nowadays omnipresent in translation processes, they have been comprised here under basic background to translation.

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