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Multilingualism in scholarly communications-NISO Plus
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Multilingualism in scholarly communications-NISO Plus
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Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
KATH BURTON: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this session on multilingualism in scholarly communications. I am Kath Burton, and I am head of Humanities Portfolio Development at Routledge, Taylor, and Francis. I've held a number of roles in books and journals publishing all with a specific focus on humanities and social sciences, and I'm here today as moderator for this fabulous panel on multilingualism. I'm joined today by three wonderful speakers, Jasmin Lange, Harini Calamur, and Jessica Clark.
KATH BURTON: Thank you to all three of you for preparing what I know will be fascinating insights. Each of us speakers will introduce themselves in a little more detail to you all. It's part of their presentation. And each will share their perspectives and experiences of publishing in multiple languages, the tools and services used to support non-English languages, and the innovative and practical initiatives that they're all involved in.
KATH BURTON: So without further ado, let's get started with our first speaker.
JASMIN LANGE: I'm Jasmin Lange, Chief Publishing Officer of Brill Publishers. Brill is an international academic publishing house specialized in publishing works in the humanities, social sciences, and international law. We were founded in 1683 in the city of Leiden in the Netherlands, where we are still headquartered today. Since our very beginning, we have been an expert in publishing in multiple languages, so I'm really excited to have the opportunity today to speak to you.
JASMIN LANGE: In my presentation, I will take a look at our history to explain where we are coming from. I will then show what multilingualism looks like at Brill, today, and how we try to support a rich and inclusive research culture. This, what you can see here on the slide is one of the earliest Brill publications from 1686, a grammar of biblical Aramaic.
JASMIN LANGE: Even at this early stage, three years after Brill was founded, the combination of different languages and writing systems was a feature of Brill typography. At the time, Leiden was not only one of the most prominent centers of scholarship in Europe. It also had a very flourishing publishing and printing industry. In this atmosphere, the founder of Brill, Jordaan Luchtmans, he set up his business specializing in printing and publishing works in fields, like religion, history, signology, classics, and Islamic studies.
JASMIN LANGE: Based on the needs of scholars in these fields, he developed an ability to type set non-Latin scripts, including Hebrew, Sanskrit, Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic. When we stride through the centuries-- and I want to show you two more examples of these abilities. Then, on the left, you see a 1747 edition of an Arabic grammar, which is a good example of the complexity that remains common in Brill books today.
JASMIN LANGE: On the right is a Sanskrit manual published in 1851, and this is interesting. Because it was not actually conceived as a scholarly work, but as a manual for type setters. Speaking of type setters, for much of Brill's history, we typeset books in house and had them also printed in the Netherlands. These photographs show the Brill composing room in the 1950s.
JASMIN LANGE: It's an anecdote told quite regularly at Brill that our type setters were well known for correcting spelling mistakes, but not because they knew Arabic or Hebrew. By the shear force of their habits, they recognize that certain letter combinations could not be correct. With the advent of digital typesetting, office and editors assumed greater responsibility for how they prepared their text for publication, and like most of the major publishers, we then also contracted out typesetting and printing.
JASMIN LANGE: Until today, however, we profit from the expertise that we developed centuries ago, and we keep it alive. We have transitioned it to the digital age, and I will say more about that later. Today, we are a multinational company, and we embrace multilingualism in its different shapes and forms. We have offices in six countries and seven locations, and we service office and customers in more than 130 countries.
JASMIN LANGE: Brill publishes around 2,000 books per year, 360 journals, and dozens of databases, bibliographies, and primary source collections. Here, you see the first part of our mission statement, and this makes really clear why we are doing this. We are trying to provide the best possible service and infrastructure to our office, because we believe that the humanities, social sciences, and international law are areas of scholarship are vital for addressing today's global challenges.
JASMIN LANGE: And we publish in subject fields, which express themselves, not through formulas, tables, or graphs, but where language is the primary medium of expression, sometimes, the object of research. And the meaning of every single word can be decisive for the understanding of the text. Multilingualism, as we understand it, includes the publication of primary and secondary research in non-English languages, the publication of bilingual or multilingual texts, and the publication of translations into English or other languages.
JASMIN LANGE: English is, of course, the lingua franca of research today, and it is, no doubt, useful that there is an agreed upon language to communicate scholarly research globally. That being said, scholars appreciate the opportunity to express themselves, to publish, and also, to reach communities in their local languages, particularly, if the publication of the topic they publish on relates to their local communities.
JASMIN LANGE: More than 60% of publications at Brill are published in English, and German is the second biggest language that we publish. But we publish in more than 100 different languages when you look at the first and the second language of a publication. Provided the biggest market is big enough-- after all, we are a commercial press. --we offer scholars the opportunity to publish in various languages.
JASMIN LANGE: Our German program was expanded significantly in 2017 with the acquisition of a number of German imprints, and we support publication, for example, in Spanish, French, or Chinese. And you can see here, a long list of other languages. Mixing languages and texts is very common in fields, like linguistics, religion, signology, or Middle Eastern studies. Yet, a complete overview would go beyond this slide.
JASMIN LANGE: Our philosophy is not only to disseminate in English around the globe, but also, to spread original research in other languages making the scholarly discourse more rich and more diverse. Amongst others, we allow-- we have launched journal, which allow publication of articles in Chinese, French, or Russian. You can see here, two examples, one in Chinese and one French journal.
JASMIN LANGE: On this slide, you can see an e-book collection of Miras Maktoob, which is a publishing house in Iran. The e-book collection contains original research from Persia in Persian. We have curated this collection edit metadata in English, which is key for the discovery of non-English language titles. Next to the secondary research, we publish primary source collection in languages other than English are quite key for our program.
JASMIN LANGE: Here, you see at the Brazilian cinema online, a collection, as well as Middle Eastern manuscripts online, two prominent examples. Finally, translating research into English has been and still is an important strategy to spread knowledge beyond language barriers. The Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture, a translation from German into English is one of these huge projects that we have done in the past.
JASMIN LANGE: You require for it-- yeah, you need really specialized translators for such a project as it is also so language sensitive. You need a lot of patience, and unfortunately, also, really a lot of money to make such projects happen. Often, these projects are not possible without government subventions, and these subventions do not really become-- yeah, they become scarce.
JASMIN LANGE: There are not more of them available. For more simpler text, we have recently made good experiences with hybrid software assisted translations, which reduce the investment needed to make non-English research more accessible, reduce it quite significantly. You still need a human being to go through these texts, of course, and edit them, but having the software translated text really helps tremendously to speed up such projects.
JASMIN LANGE: Recently, we have published an Arabic translation of the selection of the entries of the Encyclopedia of Islam, which is one of the iconic reference works of Brill. So this is an example that we are not just translating into English. We are also translating into languages other than English, and making this research on the Islam available to the Middle East in the Arabic was quite a big step for us.
JASMIN LANGE: How to present a translation is particularly important for primary source collections, such as what you can see here. That's Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah's work on medicine, which is a standard work in Islamic studies. Next to our regular platform for books and journals, we have developed this text editions platform, which makes it very user friendly to read and work with such texts alongside a translation in an online environment, and I can show you here, a screenshot of how it looks like when you're working with this text.
JASMIN LANGE: You have tools on the right hand side, and search functionality on the left, and in the middle two columns, you have the translation and the original work in Arabic. It's open access, so you can have a look. Something else that we offer for free, which is also sort of open access, at least, for non-commercial use is our own typeface.
JASMIN LANGE: The Brill, that's how it's called, and now, I have to confess that it becomes a little bit nerdy here. And that's really something for the experts, but something that is really important for us when we speak about publishing in multiple languages. We have developed our own font together with the font designer, John Hudson. As I've tried to explain in the beginning of the presentation, Brill has always been an expert in typesetting on Western script.
JASMIN LANGE: And when we transitioned our publication, our complex publications to a digital technology, the typography of our text suddenly didn't look good anymore. They were less readable. The complex and specialized nature of these texts didn't look good anymore. They often-- and that was the problem. It collided hard with the limitations of the available fonts that were just there generically and the software that we were using.
JASMIN LANGE: So we sat down, and we sat down for a number of years and developed our own font to be able to publish in as many languages as possible. And this is quite a task, as you can imagine, but the real font can do it. It's very recognizable. We use it for all our publications. It's saving costs, because it's very efficient, and it has all the tools necessary to cleanly display even the most complex aspect of scholarly texts in a way that is typographically appealing.
JASMIN LANGE: And, again, sorry, you can download it here from this link. It's not just the Brill type face that facilitates multilingual publishing at Brill. Just like hundreds of years ago, we really need, still, also, in the digital age, expert type setters for complex texts, and we work closely with a number of type setters that do a very good job in this area.
JASMIN LANGE: One of them is, for example, [Text Etwerk] in the Netherlands. They're really experts to realize difficult multilingual projects with us. I would say that at Brill, we have a certain ease to work with languages. That's thanks to our history, our partners, but also, definitely thanks to our multilingual staff. We are quite an international club at Brill, and I did a little Survey Monkey among our colleagues to see how many languages they are able to speak and how many languages they are able to read.
JASMIN LANGE: Yeah, the number of colleagues that read in, at least, more than two languages is quite-- yeah, it should say here, at least, two languages. I just see that this is incorrect here on my slide. I've seen them 10 million times, but still, it shows up now. That is quite impressive that we have a lot of bilingual staff. Many of them are trilingual, and that, of course, helps very much to foster that atmosphere of embracing multilingualism.
JASMIN LANGE: We try to support also the language skills of our staff by offering proactively language courses, and these language courses are not always only there to help colleagues to improve their writing, and reading, and speaking skills. Sometimes, it's also just a really technical course. For example, courses on Hebrew or Arabic help colleagues to understand the language better, so they can support our authors and editors in publishing those languages in those languages.
JASMIN LANGE: So to sum it up-- and I'm closing with a slide of the various special characters. And there are many, many, many, many more. That's just a little bit of an overview to show you that it's really a typeface that is serving languages around the globe. I'm closing with this slide and try to sum up my presentation a little bit. Humanities research is multilingual, and for research to flourish, we, as a publisher, we should facilitate multilingualism from a technical point of view by providing the right infrastructure, like a flexible font or a sophisticated online platform.
JASMIN LANGE: But on top of that, we, of course, must be creative and an open minded as publishers to make multilingual publications work commercially. That's key, of course, in a global research community, which is often based biased towards English. Not only in the funding, but also, in how scholars are rewarded when they publish research. A common understanding that multilingualism always has been and still is a valuable characteristic of scholarly communication would be a prerequisite to create a truly inclusive research culture.
JASMIN LANGE: Universities, libraries, research funders, we as publishers, and other providers of scholarly infrastructure can play their part in propagating this understanding. And I look forward to the discussion we will have about this topic in a few minutes. Thank you.
HARINI CALAMUR: So before I start, I'll quickly introduce myself. I'm Harini. I head Impact Science. I've worked for the trade for the last 20 plus years in the media, essentially, bringing education and information to large segments of the population in different languages. India, as you know, is a multicultural, multilinguistic country, and one of the key things here is not just to be able to communicate in one language, but invariably to communicate in multiple languages to be able to most effectively use that piece of communication.
HARINI CALAMUR: And we do that for films. We do that for video. We do that across the board, across all communications. The last three years, I've been focused on looking at academic research media and technologies to communicate research to specific audiences in various languages, and I'll speak about that later in my presentation. My personal interests are the democratization of spaces using digital technology, media studies, which I practice and I teach, and especially audience and citizen behavior.
HARINI CALAMUR: Because audiences now are-- the difference between them is disappearing. And I have a special emphasis on looking at fake news, especially fake news that looks real and fools people. Impact science essentially-- the organization that I head works with the Academic Research System, which is Journal's publisher, societies, universities, governments, funders, the entire ecosystem.
HARINI CALAMUR: And our role essentially is to communicate research to specific audiences, be they funders, be they governments, be they policymakers, be they media, be they other researchers, or even the general public across geographies and in multiple languages. So this is what we have been doing, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of those examples with you.
HARINI CALAMUR: But before we start, when I was doing my research for this talk, one of the things that struck me is how new English is as a language of communicating science. Throughout history, when you look at history of science, you look at history being multicultural, multilingual. I mean, whether it's the Arabs looking at zero from India, whether it's people writing in Latin, whether it's Egyptians, whether it's Babylonians, you are talking about multiple languages.
HARINI CALAMUR: But even if you look 120 years ago, Einstein published his first four papers, the ones that made him Einstein, the Einstein were all in German. And if people couldn't read German, if those papers were not translated, you may not have had the science that we have today. Another one of my favorites, Marie Curie. Published in French.
HARINI CALAMUR: And obviously, people were interested enough in her science to either get it translated or learn French or do both. If you look more recently-- I mean, this is one of my favorite stories is of Tu Youyou who is a Chinese Nobel Prize winner for medicine who figured out how to beat malaria by looking at Chinese traditional medicine about books.
HARINI CALAMUR: And all of those, obviously, were in Chinese. So the point I'm trying to make here very simply is that knowing multiple languages or science in multiple languages is not a new thing. And there is science in multiple languages which helps to, again, extend science itself. If you look at English in academic publishing, what you see is a rather fascinating piece of-- it's a rather fascinating graph.
HARINI CALAMUR: If you look at non-English papers, the red squiggles there-- look at the way they started way back in 1900 and look at where they are now. Less than 5% of all the output now is multilingual. Everything is English. If you look at the top 20 languages of the world, they cover all 50% of the world's population. And yet, we publish the bulk of our science 90, 95% of our science in one language that is spoken by about 335 million people.
HARINI CALAMUR: If I look at-- so I spent some time on SciMago and looked at the top-- I don't know. I think I went down to about 300-odd journals, trying to find the first non-English journal. And I couldn't find it. Even journals that were published out of France, even journals that are published out of Germany or India were all in English.
HARINI CALAMUR: So all the top 300, no matter where they came from, were in English. And the bulk of them came from the UK and the USA. And that means something as far as science is concerned. All science does not come from two countries. Now the question here is since we can watch movies from other languages, read books in other languages, listen to songs from other languages, there's no reason why we can't read academic research published in other languages.
HARINI CALAMUR: And the question here, very important question here is, why is academic publishing so slow to adapt to multilingualism? It wasn't always the case. And why is it now today? And some of the key questions for us to look at is how do you ensure that great research is not lost because of the focus on publishing in English. How do you ensure-- and this question bothers me in a country where-- India is-- we have 18 official languages.
HARINI CALAMUR: And lots of children, lots of school going children learn in their mother tongue. How do you ensure that young people studying in their mother tongue look at research as a viable career, it's not just seen as something that's practiced by English speaking people? How do you reflect the diversity in language that existed less than 100 years ago? And finally, how do you introduce multilingualism to ensure that research has the most impact?
HARINI CALAMUR: So at the first level, I believe we should look at something which is very, very simple, which is same language translation. If I look at science, if I look at academic research, it's not the easiest to understand. It's in a certain form, it's in a certain format. And that's worked for the last-- I don't know how many decades. But that is not really easy to understand and it's rather forbidding for people whose first language is not English.
HARINI CALAMUR: The time it takes for a non-native English speaker to understand the research paper is far longer than it will take even a native English speaker to understand that paper. And most native English speakers will have a problem with the way academic papers are written because it's not, again, easy to comprehend. It's not easy to comprehend at all. So one of the areas that we look at is to see how do we do plain language summaries, how do you translate-- how do you do same language-- how do you do same language translations, how do you summarize papers.
HARINI CALAMUR: And we work extensively with universities and societies and publishers to do that. One of our recent works has been with Kudos working on the knowledge collective around climate change. We did that for the COP26 event, around the COP26 event where we looked at environment research around climate change from a variety of University, societies, and other partners. And we just simplified it in a manner in which it could be understood easily.
HARINI CALAMUR: So I think that becomes very crucial-- same language translation. The second is can we look at short form articles and visual representations in other languages. That's an extremely good start again-- Summarize. Again, with 2 and 1/2 million papers being published every year, it's impossible to read all papers.
HARINI CALAMUR: So the starting point is the summary. How do you take across that research to a new audience? This is something that we did for the British Medical Journal which is working with the English language research. These are all academic papers, converting it into Chinese, ensuring the scientific efficacy of the translation, using appropriate pictures, using appropriate imagery, using appropriate videos, and running it on WeChat in China. And this does not just take this across to a particular audience which is the audience that they're looking for, the medical audience, but it also takes it across to a slightly larger audience and that people who might be interested in science.
HARINI CALAMUR: We've done some work from English to Chinese for a leading publisher and, of course, Korean to English for the Korean National Institute of Health. And this is something that we do across the board with clients that we work with who are interested in multilingual communication. For example, if you look at Japan, they're not just looking at publishing in English because publishing in English is a non-negotiable thing right now.
HARINI CALAMUR: But they're also looking at how do you take that same research with Japanese researchers have written in English to Japanese, convert back to Japanese so that Japanese audiences can understand it better. The third, I think, which is very, very important is to focus on discovery. And this is absolutely crucial. Research suggests that Google and Google Scholar deprioritize non-English language work.
HARINI CALAMUR: And this is something that is rather sad. If you look at news-- and I have handled news as a function before. In a country like India or any other country, you would not deprioritize local language results. You would give them equal importance depending on the source. With Google and Google Scholar, deprioritizing search results-- it becomes even more difficult for papers to be in local languages or non-English languages to be discovered.
HARINI CALAMUR: The paper that I read said that the first non-English result on Google Scholar was on position number 900. I don't know anybody who will-- if you look at the average page, it has about 20 search results. I don't know anybody who will go down 45 pages to look for a non-English language research paper. And this means discovery becomes even more difficult. How do you increase discovery? I mean, content hubs that aggregate subject specific research by language, meta tag English language summary.
HARINI CALAMUR: So if you have an Arabic paper, maybe it has an English summary that's meta tag. And that helps you discover, and then you can figure out later on the next step if you want to read the paper, how do you get it translated. And the use of technology tools to auto translate and auto generate meta tags-- I think this becomes extremely important. And I'm going to give you a very bad example.
HARINI CALAMUR: I don't know how many of you watch Netflix. I'm sure all of you do. It has, in many cases, auto-generated subtitles. So does YouTube. And very often, the translation is not perfect. But you get the gist. And maybe when we start looking at multilingualism in science, we shouldn't aim at perfection on day one. We're not going to get it.
HARINI CALAMUR: It is going to take time. And maybe we need to be able to-- we shouldn't be ignoring the need for multilingualism because the current translation tools aren't perfect, and that's the point I was trying to make over here. Now I look for some content. There's some very interesting content I came across called Medic Latino which aggregates all the Spanish work around medicine in one place, making discovery easier.
HARINI CALAMUR: You find a lot more of these. I think, if I'm not mistaken, this is from J-Stage, which is in Japan, which again aggregates all the research in one place. Meta tags makes it easily available, it makes it easy to discover. So content hubs becomes an extremely important way. And finally, I think this is going to be the most important. I think that we need ecosystem.
HARINI CALAMUR: We need to talk about an ecosystem for multilingual publishing. It is not new. I mean, for example, if you look at, let's say, Canada-- Canada has all its government regulation in two languages. If you look at India, we have everything in 18 languages. And you're talking about complex things like government policy or taxation law or whatever else. It's not simple stuff.
HARINI CALAMUR: The United Nations, at any point of time, puts out documents in five languages. And in most cases, this happened simultaneously. It's not an afterthought. It's not that it's created in one language and/or we will translate this in the next few years. It's all done at the same time. Otherwise, you can't run the country or you can't run the UN.
HARINI CALAMUR: And I think that when look at academic publishing, we need to bring in that kind of urgency that if a paper is published in one language, can it at least be published in three or four other languages. And what should those languages be-- that can be something that's discussed. But we need to at least start talking about that. So science should not have barriers based on language. Researchers should be able to publish in languages other than English, and it should be possible for us to peer review those papers by people who understand those language.
HARINI CALAMUR: Their translations in multiple languages need to be seamless. It shouldn't be a process. It should be automatic. And finally, all of this needs to be part of the publishing process, not the post publishing process. I think that, finally, what I want to say here is that if you talk open access and the current conversation is completely around open access, how open are we going to be or how much access are we going to give if you're going to be focused on just one language.
HARINI CALAMUR: And unless we look at multilingualism can we truly be open access. So I mean, that's all. Thank you for having me here and-- thank you.
KATH BURTON: Thank you so much, Harini. That was a fantastic run through of all of your various provocations around multilingualism and more. I think that's set the scene very nicely for our next speaker. I'm going to invite Jessica to put up her slides momentarily and thinking ahead to our conversation that will emerge as the session continues. But yeah, some really interesting things for us to get going on there.
KATH BURTON: And I'm sure we'll return to many of your provocations and questions as we go into the discussion. Jessica, over to you.
JESSICA CLARK: Good morning, everybody. Thanks very much to all the organizers of the NISO-Plus Conference for inviting me to speak to you today. My name is Jessica Clark. I'm the coordinator of a Canadian project called Coalition Publica. And this presentation is the tip of the iceberg of some thoughts that have been very present in my work, particularly over the past year.
JESSICA CLARK: So a little bit about Coalition Publica-- this is a Canadian partnership between Erudit and the Public Knowledge Project, or PKP, to advance digital scholarly publishing in Canada. We are developing a non-commercial open source national infrastructure for digital scholarly publishing which combines PKP's open journal systems and the erudit.org platform. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Open Journal System or OJS is the open source software developed and maintained by PKP that allows scholarly journals to manage their editorial activities from submission through peer review and production and publish online.
JESSICA CLARK: In the screen cap, you see three different Canadian journals with different language uses on OJS. The Erudit Platform is a centralized dissemination platform for scholarly journals based at the University of Montreal. It started its life over 20 years ago as a platform for French language journals but has now taken on a more national role in Canada and hosts both English and French language journals.
JESSICA CLARK: So at the heart of Coalition Publica is a cultural exchange. Canada's French language journals were well-represented on Erudit but lack tools for managing their editorial functions which OJS can provide whereas English language journals had broadly adopted OJS but needed more support for dissemination and connection with research discovery systems which the Erudit platform can provide. So French journals are now adopting OJS and English language journals are joining Erudit.
JESSICA CLARK: So some notes about our context here in Canada-- Canada is officially bilingual country. There is a French speaking or francophone majority in Quebec and an anglophone or English speaking majority in the rest of Canada. Bilingualism has been part of our history for centuries. But officially, the country became bilingual in 1969, which means that for over the past 50 years, we have been working to enshrine both languages equally across the country.
JESSICA CLARK: I personally see a certain fatigue around bilingualism which is summed up in the sort of Canadian cliche of two solitudes. I find it interesting that given the recent push for equity, diversity, inclusion, across a broad spectrum of our society, that we don't see language taken into account in that conversation. And I think it needs to be because our language, our perception of language, and other people's language capacities do come into how we perceive them and how, perhaps, we consciously or unconsciously judge them.
JESSICA CLARK: But when you look at Canadian journals, many are officially bilingual, which might mean that they have a title in two languages-- the Canadian Journal of... or the Revue canadienne de... and even more accept submissions in both English and French. There's a desire within Canadian journal publishing for journals to be seen as bilingual.
JESSICA CLARK: This has to do with some of our funding structures and also a sense of national importance conferred upon the journals that serve both language communities. However, it is rare to come across a journal whose content is balanced 50-50, French and English, or even more 30-70 French and English, which would be more representative of Canada's population. Most journals publish primarily in English with a small number publishing primarily in French.
JESSICA CLARK: The sector is still intensely siloed by language. It is also a very small sector and bilingualism requires resources. This takes the form of effort and human resources. You need editors and staff that can work in both languages, bilingual personnel is in short supply across the countries, especially outside of central Canada.
JESSICA CLARK: Many journals have a designated French editor, a single member of, perhaps, a multi member editorial board who is able to assess and work with French submissions. Bilingualism also requires financial resources. You need to have access to professional linguistic services like copy editing and translation. Even layout services in another language can be seen as a specialty because there are different conventions when it comes to textual layout in English and in French.
JESSICA CLARK: So given that complexity, how do you make it work? The following are just some random, practical, and philosophical considerations that I bring into my work. And I'm trying to take sort of like a big lens or a wide view into an increasingly smaller, more precise view here. So the first point-- and Harini touched on a lot of this in her presentation. So thank you very much Harini-- is increasing the acceptance of publishing and what I've termed here as not English.
JESSICA CLARK: To start with, an anecdote that was shared with me recently is regarding the indexer Scopus. A librarian who supports an independently published journal here in Canada was helping her journal apply to be indexed in Scopus. His journal is bilingual but publishes primarily in French. And when they were filling out their application and indicated that no, only some of their articles are published in English and that the other language was French, they had this box pop up asking, what is the reason to not publish all articles in English?
JESSICA CLARK: This librarian was dumbfounded as was I when she shared this with me. How would you answer this question? There are other languages, perhaps? That seems like a reasonable response to me. There are perfectly acceptable reasons for researchers to want to publish in a language other than English.
JESSICA CLARK: Perhaps they are considering their audience that the audience for their work would prefer to read research in French and the Canadian context. Perhaps they have a personal preference to write in French. Or they find that they can write a more nuanced argument in their mother tongue. These are all excellent reasons to publish in not English.
JESSICA CLARK: And these reasons are backed up by some really excellent research from Finland, published by a research team, headed by Polonen, an analysis of usage of the journal.Fi platform. And I extracted a particularly interesting quote from that study, saying that our findings indicate that Finnish language publications are particularly important for reaching students, citizens, experts, and politicians.
JESSICA CLARK: I imagine that would be the case with any non-English language where that language is not dominant in the local context. I think that goes for French in French Canada and other French speaking parts of the world and really in any other context where English is not the lingua franca. However, these excellent reasons are perhaps not taken into account in research assessment as fully as they should be.
JESSICA CLARK: And we know that research assessment for funding, tenure, and promotion is paramount for researchers. And for their publication choices, there is an often warped sense of prestige attributed to English dominant sources such as large international journals or journal impact factors that are calculated by English dominant sources and countries. I was encouraged to see that there is a initiative, the Helsinki Initiative on multilingualism, that includes reevaluating research assessment to include publication in languages other than English that are serving smaller language contexts.
JESSICA CLARK: Another practical concern, at least in my own work, is how we work together across language. And this goes beyond policy or even technical challenges. And it comes down to how we deal with each other as individuals and my own desire to embrace language as an element of equity, diversity, and inclusion. For anyone who has ever tried to learn a second, third, fourth language, it is obvious that language is a very individual experience.
JESSICA CLARK: And I think we need to acknowledge this and create more understanding within our working groups that while it might be difficult to communicate with each other and work across multiple languages, that we start with a foundation of respect for each other's expertise. And in these contexts of working together, that understanding is more important than linguistic perfection.
JESSICA CLARK: This is hard for us as publishers. Correct language is so important to us within our publications. But I think if we can embrace a context where our internal work, whether in conversation or informal written communications such as email-- if we could embrace a less perfect language that prioritizes understanding and getting the gist of things, we would feel more comfortable working with each other.
JESSICA CLARK: And we would support an exchange from our different perspectives where we sit from speakers of particular mother tongues. So how is my organization doing this? We're experimenting with what we call principles and practices or bilingual meetings. And we use our aimed at bringing anglophones and francophones together and working groups to make a space for the use of both English and French without everyone having to be perfectly bilingual.
JESSICA CLARK: This is something a little bit different in the Canadian context. It might not work. But we think that taking a risk of trying something different is better than maintaining language silos. And my last point in this section is quite technical and surrounds multilingual metadata, which is more challenging than you might expect. And here are a few scenarios-- so the most straightforward is unilingual metadata where you have, for example, an English article that is published with English metadata attached.
JESSICA CLARK: But it is not without outside of the realm of possibility that, for example, that English article could be published with French metadata. There might not be a logic behind that. But technically, it is possible. You also have translated metadata. And this point speaks again to what I mentioned before about there being a Canadian desire to be seen as bilingual within the journal community and serve two language communities.
JESSICA CLARK: So this would be, for example, an English article that's published with English and some French metadata. For example, a tech translated title abstract or set of keywords. And then you also have the metadata of translations. For example, an article in English that was translated into French. The English version is published with its English metadata, and the French translation is published with its French metadata.
JESSICA CLARK: But how are the two versions supposed to be linked so that it is clear you're accessing the English article that there is a version available in French? There doesn't appear to be many clear standards on these points. The only thing that I've heard anecdotally is that nobody wants bilingual metadata combined in one field. But what do we do otherwise?
JESSICA CLARK: What is happening to multilingual metadata downstream? And could we do more with multilingual metadata if we had better international standards? I suspect that the answer on this is yes. And we really should work towards this because it goes the discoverability of research. Research should be discoverable, not in just a single language. And research in multiple languages should be discoverable in English as well.
JESSICA CLARK: So I'll leave on a final thought. This word: ensemble in French means together. Ensemble in English is a harmonious group, as in a jazz ensemble or an ensemble cast. These words don't mean the same thing. But there's still a concordance and a connection which has to do with the etymology of this word and its historical presence in English.
JESSICA CLARK: These words now have their own place in their own language, even though they're shared across these two languages. And to me, this is a symbol. Each language has its own place in research communication, even though research is shared across the globe. So what can we do to make sure that that research is really global in the sense of both language and discoverability? Thank you very much for listening.
JESSICA CLARK: And I look forward to our conversation.
KATH BURTON: Thank you, Jessica. A great presentation there and some real good food for thought, taking us into our ensemble discussion, potentially. Just the last word from me today. Thank you all so much to our speakers. This has been a really fascinating introduction. I hope everybody in the audience will agree. We've got a great insight into some of the projects, ideas, and perhaps some of the provocations associated with publishing in multiple languages.
KATH BURTON: Each of our presentations has been equally unique and each equally united in a passion to address how we might foreground the significance of and challenges associated with multilingualism across the scholarly communications universe. I know that I am excited about our conversation. I think this has been a perfect way to set the scene for our discussion to follow.
KATH BURTON: So let's dig into some of the details now and explore how we might address some of those issues in multilingualism with our NISO-Plus audience. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Segment:0 .
KATH BURTON: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this session on multilingualism in scholarly communications. I am Kath Burton, and I am head of Humanities Portfolio Development at Routledge, Taylor, and Francis. I've held a number of roles in books and journals publishing all with a specific focus on humanities and social sciences, and I'm here today as moderator for this fabulous panel on multilingualism. I'm joined today by three wonderful speakers, Jasmin Lange, Harini Calamur, and Jessica Clark.
KATH BURTON: Thank you to all three of you for preparing what I know will be fascinating insights. Each of us speakers will introduce themselves in a little more detail to you all. It's part of their presentation. And each will share their perspectives and experiences of publishing in multiple languages, the tools and services used to support non-English languages, and the innovative and practical initiatives that they're all involved in.
KATH BURTON: So without further ado, let's get started with our first speaker.
JASMIN LANGE: I'm Jasmin Lange, Chief Publishing Officer of Brill Publishers. Brill is an international academic publishing house specialized in publishing works in the humanities, social sciences, and international law. We were founded in 1683 in the city of Leiden in the Netherlands, where we are still headquartered today. Since our very beginning, we have been an expert in publishing in multiple languages, so I'm really excited to have the opportunity today to speak to you.
JASMIN LANGE: In my presentation, I will take a look at our history to explain where we are coming from. I will then show what multilingualism looks like at Brill, today, and how we try to support a rich and inclusive research culture. This, what you can see here on the slide is one of the earliest Brill publications from 1686, a grammar of biblical Aramaic.
JASMIN LANGE: Even at this early stage, three years after Brill was founded, the combination of different languages and writing systems was a feature of Brill typography. At the time, Leiden was not only one of the most prominent centers of scholarship in Europe. It also had a very flourishing publishing and printing industry. In this atmosphere, the founder of Brill, Jordaan Luchtmans, he set up his business specializing in printing and publishing works in fields, like religion, history, signology, classics, and Islamic studies.
JASMIN LANGE: Based on the needs of scholars in these fields, he developed an ability to type set non-Latin scripts, including Hebrew, Sanskrit, Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic. When we stride through the centuries-- and I want to show you two more examples of these abilities. Then, on the left, you see a 1747 edition of an Arabic grammar, which is a good example of the complexity that remains common in Brill books today.
JASMIN LANGE: On the right is a Sanskrit manual published in 1851, and this is interesting. Because it was not actually conceived as a scholarly work, but as a manual for type setters. Speaking of type setters, for much of Brill's history, we typeset books in house and had them also printed in the Netherlands. These photographs show the Brill composing room in the 1950s.
JASMIN LANGE: It's an anecdote told quite regularly at Brill that our type setters were well known for correcting spelling mistakes, but not because they knew Arabic or Hebrew. By the shear force of their habits, they recognize that certain letter combinations could not be correct. With the advent of digital typesetting, office and editors assumed greater responsibility for how they prepared their text for publication, and like most of the major publishers, we then also contracted out typesetting and printing.
JASMIN LANGE: Until today, however, we profit from the expertise that we developed centuries ago, and we keep it alive. We have transitioned it to the digital age, and I will say more about that later. Today, we are a multinational company, and we embrace multilingualism in its different shapes and forms. We have offices in six countries and seven locations, and we service office and customers in more than 130 countries.
JASMIN LANGE: Brill publishes around 2,000 books per year, 360 journals, and dozens of databases, bibliographies, and primary source collections. Here, you see the first part of our mission statement, and this makes really clear why we are doing this. We are trying to provide the best possible service and infrastructure to our office, because we believe that the humanities, social sciences, and international law are areas of scholarship are vital for addressing today's global challenges.
JASMIN LANGE: And we publish in subject fields, which express themselves, not through formulas, tables, or graphs, but where language is the primary medium of expression, sometimes, the object of research. And the meaning of every single word can be decisive for the understanding of the text. Multilingualism, as we understand it, includes the publication of primary and secondary research in non-English languages, the publication of bilingual or multilingual texts, and the publication of translations into English or other languages.
JASMIN LANGE: English is, of course, the lingua franca of research today, and it is, no doubt, useful that there is an agreed upon language to communicate scholarly research globally. That being said, scholars appreciate the opportunity to express themselves, to publish, and also, to reach communities in their local languages, particularly, if the publication of the topic they publish on relates to their local communities.
JASMIN LANGE: More than 60% of publications at Brill are published in English, and German is the second biggest language that we publish. But we publish in more than 100 different languages when you look at the first and the second language of a publication. Provided the biggest market is big enough-- after all, we are a commercial press. --we offer scholars the opportunity to publish in various languages.
JASMIN LANGE: Our German program was expanded significantly in 2017 with the acquisition of a number of German imprints, and we support publication, for example, in Spanish, French, or Chinese. And you can see here, a long list of other languages. Mixing languages and texts is very common in fields, like linguistics, religion, signology, or Middle Eastern studies. Yet, a complete overview would go beyond this slide.
JASMIN LANGE: Our philosophy is not only to disseminate in English around the globe, but also, to spread original research in other languages making the scholarly discourse more rich and more diverse. Amongst others, we allow-- we have launched journal, which allow publication of articles in Chinese, French, or Russian. You can see here, two examples, one in Chinese and one French journal.
JASMIN LANGE: On this slide, you can see an e-book collection of Miras Maktoob, which is a publishing house in Iran. The e-book collection contains original research from Persia in Persian. We have curated this collection edit metadata in English, which is key for the discovery of non-English language titles. Next to the secondary research, we publish primary source collection in languages other than English are quite key for our program.
JASMIN LANGE: Here, you see at the Brazilian cinema online, a collection, as well as Middle Eastern manuscripts online, two prominent examples. Finally, translating research into English has been and still is an important strategy to spread knowledge beyond language barriers. The Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture, a translation from German into English is one of these huge projects that we have done in the past.
JASMIN LANGE: You require for it-- yeah, you need really specialized translators for such a project as it is also so language sensitive. You need a lot of patience, and unfortunately, also, really a lot of money to make such projects happen. Often, these projects are not possible without government subventions, and these subventions do not really become-- yeah, they become scarce.
JASMIN LANGE: There are not more of them available. For more simpler text, we have recently made good experiences with hybrid software assisted translations, which reduce the investment needed to make non-English research more accessible, reduce it quite significantly. You still need a human being to go through these texts, of course, and edit them, but having the software translated text really helps tremendously to speed up such projects.
JASMIN LANGE: Recently, we have published an Arabic translation of the selection of the entries of the Encyclopedia of Islam, which is one of the iconic reference works of Brill. So this is an example that we are not just translating into English. We are also translating into languages other than English, and making this research on the Islam available to the Middle East in the Arabic was quite a big step for us.
JASMIN LANGE: How to present a translation is particularly important for primary source collections, such as what you can see here. That's Ibn Abi Usaybi'ah's work on medicine, which is a standard work in Islamic studies. Next to our regular platform for books and journals, we have developed this text editions platform, which makes it very user friendly to read and work with such texts alongside a translation in an online environment, and I can show you here, a screenshot of how it looks like when you're working with this text.
JASMIN LANGE: You have tools on the right hand side, and search functionality on the left, and in the middle two columns, you have the translation and the original work in Arabic. It's open access, so you can have a look. Something else that we offer for free, which is also sort of open access, at least, for non-commercial use is our own typeface.
JASMIN LANGE: The Brill, that's how it's called, and now, I have to confess that it becomes a little bit nerdy here. And that's really something for the experts, but something that is really important for us when we speak about publishing in multiple languages. We have developed our own font together with the font designer, John Hudson. As I've tried to explain in the beginning of the presentation, Brill has always been an expert in typesetting on Western script.
JASMIN LANGE: And when we transitioned our publication, our complex publications to a digital technology, the typography of our text suddenly didn't look good anymore. They were less readable. The complex and specialized nature of these texts didn't look good anymore. They often-- and that was the problem. It collided hard with the limitations of the available fonts that were just there generically and the software that we were using.
JASMIN LANGE: So we sat down, and we sat down for a number of years and developed our own font to be able to publish in as many languages as possible. And this is quite a task, as you can imagine, but the real font can do it. It's very recognizable. We use it for all our publications. It's saving costs, because it's very efficient, and it has all the tools necessary to cleanly display even the most complex aspect of scholarly texts in a way that is typographically appealing.
JASMIN LANGE: And, again, sorry, you can download it here from this link. It's not just the Brill type face that facilitates multilingual publishing at Brill. Just like hundreds of years ago, we really need, still, also, in the digital age, expert type setters for complex texts, and we work closely with a number of type setters that do a very good job in this area.
JASMIN LANGE: One of them is, for example, [Text Etwerk] in the Netherlands. They're really experts to realize difficult multilingual projects with us. I would say that at Brill, we have a certain ease to work with languages. That's thanks to our history, our partners, but also, definitely thanks to our multilingual staff. We are quite an international club at Brill, and I did a little Survey Monkey among our colleagues to see how many languages they are able to speak and how many languages they are able to read.
JASMIN LANGE: Yeah, the number of colleagues that read in, at least, more than two languages is quite-- yeah, it should say here, at least, two languages. I just see that this is incorrect here on my slide. I've seen them 10 million times, but still, it shows up now. That is quite impressive that we have a lot of bilingual staff. Many of them are trilingual, and that, of course, helps very much to foster that atmosphere of embracing multilingualism.
JASMIN LANGE: We try to support also the language skills of our staff by offering proactively language courses, and these language courses are not always only there to help colleagues to improve their writing, and reading, and speaking skills. Sometimes, it's also just a really technical course. For example, courses on Hebrew or Arabic help colleagues to understand the language better, so they can support our authors and editors in publishing those languages in those languages.
JASMIN LANGE: So to sum it up-- and I'm closing with a slide of the various special characters. And there are many, many, many, many more. That's just a little bit of an overview to show you that it's really a typeface that is serving languages around the globe. I'm closing with this slide and try to sum up my presentation a little bit. Humanities research is multilingual, and for research to flourish, we, as a publisher, we should facilitate multilingualism from a technical point of view by providing the right infrastructure, like a flexible font or a sophisticated online platform.
JASMIN LANGE: But on top of that, we, of course, must be creative and an open minded as publishers to make multilingual publications work commercially. That's key, of course, in a global research community, which is often based biased towards English. Not only in the funding, but also, in how scholars are rewarded when they publish research. A common understanding that multilingualism always has been and still is a valuable characteristic of scholarly communication would be a prerequisite to create a truly inclusive research culture.
JASMIN LANGE: Universities, libraries, research funders, we as publishers, and other providers of scholarly infrastructure can play their part in propagating this understanding. And I look forward to the discussion we will have about this topic in a few minutes. Thank you.
HARINI CALAMUR: So before I start, I'll quickly introduce myself. I'm Harini. I head Impact Science. I've worked for the trade for the last 20 plus years in the media, essentially, bringing education and information to large segments of the population in different languages. India, as you know, is a multicultural, multilinguistic country, and one of the key things here is not just to be able to communicate in one language, but invariably to communicate in multiple languages to be able to most effectively use that piece of communication.
HARINI CALAMUR: And we do that for films. We do that for video. We do that across the board, across all communications. The last three years, I've been focused on looking at academic research media and technologies to communicate research to specific audiences in various languages, and I'll speak about that later in my presentation. My personal interests are the democratization of spaces using digital technology, media studies, which I practice and I teach, and especially audience and citizen behavior.
HARINI CALAMUR: Because audiences now are-- the difference between them is disappearing. And I have a special emphasis on looking at fake news, especially fake news that looks real and fools people. Impact science essentially-- the organization that I head works with the Academic Research System, which is Journal's publisher, societies, universities, governments, funders, the entire ecosystem.
HARINI CALAMUR: And our role essentially is to communicate research to specific audiences, be they funders, be they governments, be they policymakers, be they media, be they other researchers, or even the general public across geographies and in multiple languages. So this is what we have been doing, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of those examples with you.
HARINI CALAMUR: But before we start, when I was doing my research for this talk, one of the things that struck me is how new English is as a language of communicating science. Throughout history, when you look at history of science, you look at history being multicultural, multilingual. I mean, whether it's the Arabs looking at zero from India, whether it's people writing in Latin, whether it's Egyptians, whether it's Babylonians, you are talking about multiple languages.
HARINI CALAMUR: But even if you look 120 years ago, Einstein published his first four papers, the ones that made him Einstein, the Einstein were all in German. And if people couldn't read German, if those papers were not translated, you may not have had the science that we have today. Another one of my favorites, Marie Curie. Published in French.
HARINI CALAMUR: And obviously, people were interested enough in her science to either get it translated or learn French or do both. If you look more recently-- I mean, this is one of my favorite stories is of Tu Youyou who is a Chinese Nobel Prize winner for medicine who figured out how to beat malaria by looking at Chinese traditional medicine about books.
HARINI CALAMUR: And all of those, obviously, were in Chinese. So the point I'm trying to make here very simply is that knowing multiple languages or science in multiple languages is not a new thing. And there is science in multiple languages which helps to, again, extend science itself. If you look at English in academic publishing, what you see is a rather fascinating piece of-- it's a rather fascinating graph.
HARINI CALAMUR: If you look at non-English papers, the red squiggles there-- look at the way they started way back in 1900 and look at where they are now. Less than 5% of all the output now is multilingual. Everything is English. If you look at the top 20 languages of the world, they cover all 50% of the world's population. And yet, we publish the bulk of our science 90, 95% of our science in one language that is spoken by about 335 million people.
HARINI CALAMUR: If I look at-- so I spent some time on SciMago and looked at the top-- I don't know. I think I went down to about 300-odd journals, trying to find the first non-English journal. And I couldn't find it. Even journals that were published out of France, even journals that are published out of Germany or India were all in English.
HARINI CALAMUR: So all the top 300, no matter where they came from, were in English. And the bulk of them came from the UK and the USA. And that means something as far as science is concerned. All science does not come from two countries. Now the question here is since we can watch movies from other languages, read books in other languages, listen to songs from other languages, there's no reason why we can't read academic research published in other languages.
HARINI CALAMUR: And the question here, very important question here is, why is academic publishing so slow to adapt to multilingualism? It wasn't always the case. And why is it now today? And some of the key questions for us to look at is how do you ensure that great research is not lost because of the focus on publishing in English. How do you ensure-- and this question bothers me in a country where-- India is-- we have 18 official languages.
HARINI CALAMUR: And lots of children, lots of school going children learn in their mother tongue. How do you ensure that young people studying in their mother tongue look at research as a viable career, it's not just seen as something that's practiced by English speaking people? How do you reflect the diversity in language that existed less than 100 years ago? And finally, how do you introduce multilingualism to ensure that research has the most impact?
HARINI CALAMUR: So at the first level, I believe we should look at something which is very, very simple, which is same language translation. If I look at science, if I look at academic research, it's not the easiest to understand. It's in a certain form, it's in a certain format. And that's worked for the last-- I don't know how many decades. But that is not really easy to understand and it's rather forbidding for people whose first language is not English.
HARINI CALAMUR: The time it takes for a non-native English speaker to understand the research paper is far longer than it will take even a native English speaker to understand that paper. And most native English speakers will have a problem with the way academic papers are written because it's not, again, easy to comprehend. It's not easy to comprehend at all. So one of the areas that we look at is to see how do we do plain language summaries, how do you translate-- how do you do same language-- how do you do same language translations, how do you summarize papers.
HARINI CALAMUR: And we work extensively with universities and societies and publishers to do that. One of our recent works has been with Kudos working on the knowledge collective around climate change. We did that for the COP26 event, around the COP26 event where we looked at environment research around climate change from a variety of University, societies, and other partners. And we just simplified it in a manner in which it could be understood easily.
HARINI CALAMUR: So I think that becomes very crucial-- same language translation. The second is can we look at short form articles and visual representations in other languages. That's an extremely good start again-- Summarize. Again, with 2 and 1/2 million papers being published every year, it's impossible to read all papers.
HARINI CALAMUR: So the starting point is the summary. How do you take across that research to a new audience? This is something that we did for the British Medical Journal which is working with the English language research. These are all academic papers, converting it into Chinese, ensuring the scientific efficacy of the translation, using appropriate pictures, using appropriate imagery, using appropriate videos, and running it on WeChat in China. And this does not just take this across to a particular audience which is the audience that they're looking for, the medical audience, but it also takes it across to a slightly larger audience and that people who might be interested in science.
HARINI CALAMUR: We've done some work from English to Chinese for a leading publisher and, of course, Korean to English for the Korean National Institute of Health. And this is something that we do across the board with clients that we work with who are interested in multilingual communication. For example, if you look at Japan, they're not just looking at publishing in English because publishing in English is a non-negotiable thing right now.
HARINI CALAMUR: But they're also looking at how do you take that same research with Japanese researchers have written in English to Japanese, convert back to Japanese so that Japanese audiences can understand it better. The third, I think, which is very, very important is to focus on discovery. And this is absolutely crucial. Research suggests that Google and Google Scholar deprioritize non-English language work.
HARINI CALAMUR: And this is something that is rather sad. If you look at news-- and I have handled news as a function before. In a country like India or any other country, you would not deprioritize local language results. You would give them equal importance depending on the source. With Google and Google Scholar, deprioritizing search results-- it becomes even more difficult for papers to be in local languages or non-English languages to be discovered.
HARINI CALAMUR: The paper that I read said that the first non-English result on Google Scholar was on position number 900. I don't know anybody who will-- if you look at the average page, it has about 20 search results. I don't know anybody who will go down 45 pages to look for a non-English language research paper. And this means discovery becomes even more difficult. How do you increase discovery? I mean, content hubs that aggregate subject specific research by language, meta tag English language summary.
HARINI CALAMUR: So if you have an Arabic paper, maybe it has an English summary that's meta tag. And that helps you discover, and then you can figure out later on the next step if you want to read the paper, how do you get it translated. And the use of technology tools to auto translate and auto generate meta tags-- I think this becomes extremely important. And I'm going to give you a very bad example.
HARINI CALAMUR: I don't know how many of you watch Netflix. I'm sure all of you do. It has, in many cases, auto-generated subtitles. So does YouTube. And very often, the translation is not perfect. But you get the gist. And maybe when we start looking at multilingualism in science, we shouldn't aim at perfection on day one. We're not going to get it.
HARINI CALAMUR: It is going to take time. And maybe we need to be able to-- we shouldn't be ignoring the need for multilingualism because the current translation tools aren't perfect, and that's the point I was trying to make over here. Now I look for some content. There's some very interesting content I came across called Medic Latino which aggregates all the Spanish work around medicine in one place, making discovery easier.
HARINI CALAMUR: You find a lot more of these. I think, if I'm not mistaken, this is from J-Stage, which is in Japan, which again aggregates all the research in one place. Meta tags makes it easily available, it makes it easy to discover. So content hubs becomes an extremely important way. And finally, I think this is going to be the most important. I think that we need ecosystem.
HARINI CALAMUR: We need to talk about an ecosystem for multilingual publishing. It is not new. I mean, for example, if you look at, let's say, Canada-- Canada has all its government regulation in two languages. If you look at India, we have everything in 18 languages. And you're talking about complex things like government policy or taxation law or whatever else. It's not simple stuff.
HARINI CALAMUR: The United Nations, at any point of time, puts out documents in five languages. And in most cases, this happened simultaneously. It's not an afterthought. It's not that it's created in one language and/or we will translate this in the next few years. It's all done at the same time. Otherwise, you can't run the country or you can't run the UN.
HARINI CALAMUR: And I think that when look at academic publishing, we need to bring in that kind of urgency that if a paper is published in one language, can it at least be published in three or four other languages. And what should those languages be-- that can be something that's discussed. But we need to at least start talking about that. So science should not have barriers based on language. Researchers should be able to publish in languages other than English, and it should be possible for us to peer review those papers by people who understand those language.
HARINI CALAMUR: Their translations in multiple languages need to be seamless. It shouldn't be a process. It should be automatic. And finally, all of this needs to be part of the publishing process, not the post publishing process. I think that, finally, what I want to say here is that if you talk open access and the current conversation is completely around open access, how open are we going to be or how much access are we going to give if you're going to be focused on just one language.
HARINI CALAMUR: And unless we look at multilingualism can we truly be open access. So I mean, that's all. Thank you for having me here and-- thank you.
KATH BURTON: Thank you so much, Harini. That was a fantastic run through of all of your various provocations around multilingualism and more. I think that's set the scene very nicely for our next speaker. I'm going to invite Jessica to put up her slides momentarily and thinking ahead to our conversation that will emerge as the session continues. But yeah, some really interesting things for us to get going on there.
KATH BURTON: And I'm sure we'll return to many of your provocations and questions as we go into the discussion. Jessica, over to you.
JESSICA CLARK: Good morning, everybody. Thanks very much to all the organizers of the NISO-Plus Conference for inviting me to speak to you today. My name is Jessica Clark. I'm the coordinator of a Canadian project called Coalition Publica. And this presentation is the tip of the iceberg of some thoughts that have been very present in my work, particularly over the past year.
JESSICA CLARK: So a little bit about Coalition Publica-- this is a Canadian partnership between Erudit and the Public Knowledge Project, or PKP, to advance digital scholarly publishing in Canada. We are developing a non-commercial open source national infrastructure for digital scholarly publishing which combines PKP's open journal systems and the erudit.org platform. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Open Journal System or OJS is the open source software developed and maintained by PKP that allows scholarly journals to manage their editorial activities from submission through peer review and production and publish online.
JESSICA CLARK: In the screen cap, you see three different Canadian journals with different language uses on OJS. The Erudit Platform is a centralized dissemination platform for scholarly journals based at the University of Montreal. It started its life over 20 years ago as a platform for French language journals but has now taken on a more national role in Canada and hosts both English and French language journals.
JESSICA CLARK: So at the heart of Coalition Publica is a cultural exchange. Canada's French language journals were well-represented on Erudit but lack tools for managing their editorial functions which OJS can provide whereas English language journals had broadly adopted OJS but needed more support for dissemination and connection with research discovery systems which the Erudit platform can provide. So French journals are now adopting OJS and English language journals are joining Erudit.
JESSICA CLARK: So some notes about our context here in Canada-- Canada is officially bilingual country. There is a French speaking or francophone majority in Quebec and an anglophone or English speaking majority in the rest of Canada. Bilingualism has been part of our history for centuries. But officially, the country became bilingual in 1969, which means that for over the past 50 years, we have been working to enshrine both languages equally across the country.
JESSICA CLARK: I personally see a certain fatigue around bilingualism which is summed up in the sort of Canadian cliche of two solitudes. I find it interesting that given the recent push for equity, diversity, inclusion, across a broad spectrum of our society, that we don't see language taken into account in that conversation. And I think it needs to be because our language, our perception of language, and other people's language capacities do come into how we perceive them and how, perhaps, we consciously or unconsciously judge them.
JESSICA CLARK: But when you look at Canadian journals, many are officially bilingual, which might mean that they have a title in two languages-- the Canadian Journal of... or the Revue canadienne de... and even more accept submissions in both English and French. There's a desire within Canadian journal publishing for journals to be seen as bilingual.
JESSICA CLARK: This has to do with some of our funding structures and also a sense of national importance conferred upon the journals that serve both language communities. However, it is rare to come across a journal whose content is balanced 50-50, French and English, or even more 30-70 French and English, which would be more representative of Canada's population. Most journals publish primarily in English with a small number publishing primarily in French.
JESSICA CLARK: The sector is still intensely siloed by language. It is also a very small sector and bilingualism requires resources. This takes the form of effort and human resources. You need editors and staff that can work in both languages, bilingual personnel is in short supply across the countries, especially outside of central Canada.
JESSICA CLARK: Many journals have a designated French editor, a single member of, perhaps, a multi member editorial board who is able to assess and work with French submissions. Bilingualism also requires financial resources. You need to have access to professional linguistic services like copy editing and translation. Even layout services in another language can be seen as a specialty because there are different conventions when it comes to textual layout in English and in French.
JESSICA CLARK: So given that complexity, how do you make it work? The following are just some random, practical, and philosophical considerations that I bring into my work. And I'm trying to take sort of like a big lens or a wide view into an increasingly smaller, more precise view here. So the first point-- and Harini touched on a lot of this in her presentation. So thank you very much Harini-- is increasing the acceptance of publishing and what I've termed here as not English.
JESSICA CLARK: To start with, an anecdote that was shared with me recently is regarding the indexer Scopus. A librarian who supports an independently published journal here in Canada was helping her journal apply to be indexed in Scopus. His journal is bilingual but publishes primarily in French. And when they were filling out their application and indicated that no, only some of their articles are published in English and that the other language was French, they had this box pop up asking, what is the reason to not publish all articles in English?
JESSICA CLARK: This librarian was dumbfounded as was I when she shared this with me. How would you answer this question? There are other languages, perhaps? That seems like a reasonable response to me. There are perfectly acceptable reasons for researchers to want to publish in a language other than English.
JESSICA CLARK: Perhaps they are considering their audience that the audience for their work would prefer to read research in French and the Canadian context. Perhaps they have a personal preference to write in French. Or they find that they can write a more nuanced argument in their mother tongue. These are all excellent reasons to publish in not English.
JESSICA CLARK: And these reasons are backed up by some really excellent research from Finland, published by a research team, headed by Polonen, an analysis of usage of the journal.Fi platform. And I extracted a particularly interesting quote from that study, saying that our findings indicate that Finnish language publications are particularly important for reaching students, citizens, experts, and politicians.
JESSICA CLARK: I imagine that would be the case with any non-English language where that language is not dominant in the local context. I think that goes for French in French Canada and other French speaking parts of the world and really in any other context where English is not the lingua franca. However, these excellent reasons are perhaps not taken into account in research assessment as fully as they should be.
JESSICA CLARK: And we know that research assessment for funding, tenure, and promotion is paramount for researchers. And for their publication choices, there is an often warped sense of prestige attributed to English dominant sources such as large international journals or journal impact factors that are calculated by English dominant sources and countries. I was encouraged to see that there is a initiative, the Helsinki Initiative on multilingualism, that includes reevaluating research assessment to include publication in languages other than English that are serving smaller language contexts.
JESSICA CLARK: Another practical concern, at least in my own work, is how we work together across language. And this goes beyond policy or even technical challenges. And it comes down to how we deal with each other as individuals and my own desire to embrace language as an element of equity, diversity, and inclusion. For anyone who has ever tried to learn a second, third, fourth language, it is obvious that language is a very individual experience.
JESSICA CLARK: And I think we need to acknowledge this and create more understanding within our working groups that while it might be difficult to communicate with each other and work across multiple languages, that we start with a foundation of respect for each other's expertise. And in these contexts of working together, that understanding is more important than linguistic perfection.
JESSICA CLARK: This is hard for us as publishers. Correct language is so important to us within our publications. But I think if we can embrace a context where our internal work, whether in conversation or informal written communications such as email-- if we could embrace a less perfect language that prioritizes understanding and getting the gist of things, we would feel more comfortable working with each other.
JESSICA CLARK: And we would support an exchange from our different perspectives where we sit from speakers of particular mother tongues. So how is my organization doing this? We're experimenting with what we call principles and practices or bilingual meetings. And we use our aimed at bringing anglophones and francophones together and working groups to make a space for the use of both English and French without everyone having to be perfectly bilingual.
JESSICA CLARK: This is something a little bit different in the Canadian context. It might not work. But we think that taking a risk of trying something different is better than maintaining language silos. And my last point in this section is quite technical and surrounds multilingual metadata, which is more challenging than you might expect. And here are a few scenarios-- so the most straightforward is unilingual metadata where you have, for example, an English article that is published with English metadata attached.
JESSICA CLARK: But it is not without outside of the realm of possibility that, for example, that English article could be published with French metadata. There might not be a logic behind that. But technically, it is possible. You also have translated metadata. And this point speaks again to what I mentioned before about there being a Canadian desire to be seen as bilingual within the journal community and serve two language communities.
JESSICA CLARK: So this would be, for example, an English article that's published with English and some French metadata. For example, a tech translated title abstract or set of keywords. And then you also have the metadata of translations. For example, an article in English that was translated into French. The English version is published with its English metadata, and the French translation is published with its French metadata.
JESSICA CLARK: But how are the two versions supposed to be linked so that it is clear you're accessing the English article that there is a version available in French? There doesn't appear to be many clear standards on these points. The only thing that I've heard anecdotally is that nobody wants bilingual metadata combined in one field. But what do we do otherwise?
JESSICA CLARK: What is happening to multilingual metadata downstream? And could we do more with multilingual metadata if we had better international standards? I suspect that the answer on this is yes. And we really should work towards this because it goes the discoverability of research. Research should be discoverable, not in just a single language. And research in multiple languages should be discoverable in English as well.
JESSICA CLARK: So I'll leave on a final thought. This word: ensemble in French means together. Ensemble in English is a harmonious group, as in a jazz ensemble or an ensemble cast. These words don't mean the same thing. But there's still a concordance and a connection which has to do with the etymology of this word and its historical presence in English.
JESSICA CLARK: These words now have their own place in their own language, even though they're shared across these two languages. And to me, this is a symbol. Each language has its own place in research communication, even though research is shared across the globe. So what can we do to make sure that that research is really global in the sense of both language and discoverability? Thank you very much for listening.
JESSICA CLARK: And I look forward to our conversation.
KATH BURTON: Thank you, Jessica. A great presentation there and some real good food for thought, taking us into our ensemble discussion, potentially. Just the last word from me today. Thank you all so much to our speakers. This has been a really fascinating introduction. I hope everybody in the audience will agree. We've got a great insight into some of the projects, ideas, and perhaps some of the provocations associated with publishing in multiple languages.
KATH BURTON: Each of our presentations has been equally unique and each equally united in a passion to address how we might foreground the significance of and challenges associated with multilingualism across the scholarly communications universe. I know that I am excited about our conversation. I think this has been a perfect way to set the scene for our discussion to follow.
KATH BURTON: So let's dig into some of the details now and explore how we might address some of those issues in multilingualism with our NISO-Plus audience. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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