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Book Launch: Plain Language for Translators

At an earlier core contributor meeting this year we learned about a newly published book called Plain Language for Translators from one of our contributors, Lynne Bowker. We thought this topic might be of interest to our community so we reached out to see if Lynne would give a talk. Fortunately for us both, she was looking to launch her book! We agreed to host the book launch to hear more about plain language and have an opportunity to ask questions about how it is relevant to multilingual open science.

Her talk will explore plain language as a form of intralingual translation and offer tips on how to apply it. Join us online on Monday April 13th at 14:00 UTC to hear an overview of the main issues involved in designing, developing, and evaluating plain language documents in communicative settings such as government, legal, health, and science communication.

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Translate Science is launching a PREreview Club!

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We Are Armed only With Peer Reviewed Science” by London Permaculture is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Who is Translate Science?

We’re an all-volunteer community of interest for people interested in multilingual open science. We explore the topic from a wide variety of perspectives. Learn more at our website.

What is a PREreview Club?

PREreview Clubs publish open peer reviews of preprints, providing constructive feedback while collaborating around a shared interest. Learn more on the PREreview website.

So what exactly will you be doing?

We’re open to experimenting with a variety of models. For our first review, in May, here’s the plan:

  1. Send a poll to our mailing list with several potential preprints we might review.
  2. Select a preprint to review based on poll responses.
  3. Schedule a 90-minute online collaborative review session, then promote the session to our community.
  4. Synthesize comments from the review session and publish our review on PREreview by the end of May.
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Recap and Lessons on Research Software Localization from February Talk

How does software written in one language come to be available in other languages? And how is this process, known as localization, different for research software? Those were key questions adressed by Christopher Hertweck’s talk delivered on February 24th, 2026 online.

To begin, Christopher briefly introduced us to the use of SketchEngine, a web-based tool for compiling and analysing linguistic data collections (so-called corpora, or in singular corpus). SketchEngine exists both as a commercial product and an open-source variant, NoSketchEngine, with somewhat reduced functionality. The localization from English into German was done by a team of students as part of an internship project supervised by Lexical Computing (the company behind SketchEngine), and myself, Oliver Czulo (then a professor at Leipzig University). During the localization project, the team of students faced various challenges that often occur in localization.

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Translating research software: Localization of the Sketch Engine user interface

To start this year, the Translate Science core contributors are collaborating with the Institut Translatologie to host a talk about the challenges and best practices of localizing (research) software. We hope that this event can inform participants and serve to bring together others engaging with issues in multilingual open science.

Our guest Christopher Hertweck localized the user interface of Sketch Engine, a tool for creating and analyzing text corpora, from English into German as part of an internship project with a small team of students. Join us online on Tuesday February 24th at 14:00 UTC to hear more about this project.

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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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Takver resued under CC-BY-SA 2.0

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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