Welcome to this BONUS episode featuring the inaugural Translate Science Panel Discussion.
About Translate Science
Translate Science is an all-volunteer community of interest for multilingual open science. The community supports gatherings of its members to share opportunities and perspectives about the many ways in which a more multilingual and open scientific enterprise can be achieved.
Being a part of the Translate Science community can mean many different things because the work of increasing multilingualism within the scientific enterprise by necessity engages diverse actors working in science. In our first panel discussion, the Translate Science core contributors are seeking to help our wider community understand different approaches by providing a platform for folks to share how they advance open and multilingual science in their current role.
In this iteration of our Translate Science community meeting we will be featuring Lynne Bowker and Emma Steigerwald.
How do you bring open science values into your role?
How do you bring multilingualism into your role?
Questions of audience:
besides machine translation literacy, how much translation competence do you think people would need to translate science?
What is the importance of translation features or tools on platforms like Zooniverse or Citizen Science portals - do you believe more translation features and tools would incentivize or increase citizen participation in citizen science?
For Emma - when distributing your work to local students in Spanish, did you encounter any students whose primary language was not Spanish? Were there any considerations regarding publishing the comic in local indigenous languages?
What do you think of AI as a tool for scientific translations?
Can you speak more on the implications of the term "plain English" when we know that there are even various dialects and regionalisms within English? For example, Black English
What do you think is a good strategy to bring more multilingualism into scientific publications?
References
Emma Steigerwald, Valeria Ramírez-Castañeda, Débora Y C Brandt, András Báldi, Julie Teresa Shapiro, Lynne Bowker, Rebecca D Tarvin, OvercomingLanguage Barriers in Academia: Machine Translation Tools and a Vision for a Multilingual Future, BioScience, Volume 72, Issue 10, October 2022, Pages 988–998, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac062
Book: De-mystifying Translation. Introducing Translation to Non-translators; ByLynne Bowker
Speaker profiles
Lynne Bowker, PhD, is Full Professor at the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa and incoming Canada Research Chair in Translation, Technologies, and Society at Université Laval. She is the director of the Machine Translation Literacy Project and author of the open access book De-mystifying Translation (2023, Routledge). She is also a certified French-English translator specializing in scientific and technical translation. You can find more details about her publications and other activities on her LinkedIn and ORCID pages.
Emma Steigerwald is a conservation genomicist interested in understanding how forces like climate change and emerging infectious diseases impact the evolutionary and demographic trajectories of populations– particularly in amphibians. She is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz, where she was just awarded a University of California Chancellor’s Fellowship. She recently finished her PhD at UC Berkeley in August of 2023. Her dissertation fieldwork and outreach in the high Andes contributed to her interest in making access to scientific careers and scientific findings more equitable. She served as founding chair of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology’s Translation Working Group, and continues through this group to work on collaborations focused on increasing linguistic diversity in science.
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