Author Archives: Translate Science Initiative

Yellow promotional image with the Translate Science Logo and a text box inviting folks to the event

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 a university project in 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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Launch of Translate Science

Translate Science is interested in the translation of the scholarly literature. Translate Science is an open volunteer group interested in improving the translation of the scientific literature. The group has come together to support work on tools, services and advocate for translating science.

The groups members have different background and motivations. Hydrogeologist Dasapta Irawan would like scientists to be able to write in the language of the people they serve. Ben Trettel works on the breakup of turbulent water jets and regrets that so much insight from the Russian turbulence literature is ignored. Victor Venema works on observed climate trends and needs information on (historical) measurement methods, which are kept in local languages; his field needs to understand climate impacts everywhere and quality data from all countries of the world. Luke Okelo, Johanssen Obanda and Jo Havemann are working with AfricArxiv – the community-led Open Access portal to promote African research output. They are interested in seeing scientific literature in African languages transcend traditional scholarly publishing barriers that indigenous languages come up against and will soon launch a collaborative effort to translate African scholarly manuscripts into various African languages.

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