June 06, 2018

Multi languages in European science


It was a pleasure to read the article. The writing style was very fluent, no grammatical error were in there and the idea itself is interesting. I've also recognized that former local languages like German, French, Italian and Mandarin are very rare in the scientific community. So it would be a nice idea to promote the usage of these language. That means, if somebody has written a paper, for example in German about a current topic in science, he should become top-priority compared to a normal submission which was written only in English. I think, the local European languages should become a much broader role, because otherwise they will die. It is important to train at universities with the student to write in their local mother tongue. It must not always be German, the Chinese language is also an interesting example. Writing a paper in Chinese can be a demanding task, especially for people who are not familiar with it. If somebody is able and motivated in doing so, he should be supported by the community, which means by his university.
Another important point is, that for many English words no translation is available. The idea of French to translate computer into ordinateur is a good example, how a modern scientific french can be look like. That idea should be practiced in other languages too. This helps to enrich the vocabulary, and to make a local language more attractive for the students. A starting point is to translate the term “machine learning” into non-english languages, for example into “apprentissage automatique”, “maschinelles Lernen” or 机器学习.