![]() The class led Tarvin and some graduate students at UC Berkeley, along with collaborators in Canada, Israel and Hungary, to write a scientific paper evaluating new machine translation tools that can be used by people worldwide to make their scientific articles accessible to non-English speakers. Rebecca Tarvin, who studies how animals use toxins as a defense without themselves becoming sick, holding an octopus. And in fact, I have seen a really positive reception of this sort of activism from the students, as they all seem to agree that addressing language barriers is really important after taking the course.” was an “opportunity to both teach students skills in translation literacy, as well as encourage students to be activists in this realm of structural change. “Translation has been a part of their life since they were very young.”īreaking Language Barriers in Evolution and Ecology “Many of our students from California grew up translating for their parents,” Tarvin said. , 39% of first-generation students grew up with a language other than English as their first language. In fall 2020, about 40% of entering UC Berkeley freshmen were first-generation college students, and within the 10-campus University of California It’s not just foreign students and scientists who are at a disadvantage when science is communicated primarily in English. Undergraduate Xinyi Liu, who is from China, poses in front of the Pigeon Point Lighthouse along the San Mateo Coast. With renewed campuswide interest in diversity, equity and inclusion, she and working groups within her department thought that the class could help UC Berkeley address a long-standing issue in science: English, the dominant language of science, is a major obstacle to scientists who are not native English speakers. That class, which will be taught at UC Berkeley for a third time in spring 2023, was a trial balloon for Tarvin, an assistant professor of integrative biology. So last year, when she saw a new seminar being taught byĪbout breaking language barriers in science, she signed up. There had to be a better way, she thought. “Literally, all the words, all the terms were stuck together just randomly.” But after the first translation, the whole paper didn’t make sense,” said Liu, a rising junior at the University of California, Berkeley, who is majoring in molecular and cell biology. ![]() “It was normal for postdocs to just use Google Translate to first translate everything and then to modify and polish it. Translation is a must if scientists want to submit to high-profile journals, almost all of which are in English. ![]() While still in high school, Xinyi Liu worked briefly in a lab at Beihang University in Beijing and was surprised to see Chinese researchers routinely using Google Translate to generate the first English draft of scientific papers. (Image credit: Valeria Ramírez-Castañeda, UC Berkeley) Nevertheless, scientists should prioritize translating articles into multiple languages to provide an equitable landscape for budding scientists worldwide, UC Berkeley researchers argue. Machine learning using artificial intelligence has improved computer translation over the past decade, but scientific articles employing specialized jargon are still a challenge for machine translation. ![]()
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