Challenge to overcome language barriers in scientific journals: announcing a new initiative from the ISQua journal

Abstract

Frequently, it is stated that research in non-English languages is less available and referenced than the one published in English, and that important information published in languages other than English may be probably lost or, in practice, non-existent for the scientific community as a whole. Additionally, non-English speaking readers may find difficult to understand and eventually use or be aware of scientific papers published in English, even though they may be potentially relevant for their field of interest. Furthermore, writing in a language that is not your mother tongue, as it is the case of English for many researchers, is not easy. Publishing in English when the original research is in another language may be costly because in most cases professional support for translation is needed, and costs for this process can exceed €1000 (1300 US $) per article. Therefore, researchers from non-English speaking countries have to overcome significant barriers to see their work published, and also to be up-to-date in their professional field; this fact may have important and very inconvenient consequences for their curricula, scientific carriers and eventually for the scientific development in their countries. On the other side, valuable information may be lost for English-speaking researchers or under-represented in a given field when research is not published in English. For instance, when an innovative methodology is developed in a non-English speaking country or within a cultural context that is not the mainstream situation in developing countries. When this issue is occasionally discussed, editorial committees' members of supposedly international journals usually shrug their shoulders and at most agree on something like ‘this is the price for being published…’ or ‘nowadays, English is the language of science, so…’; but few initiatives have been taken to address this problem. It seems that maximizing the diffusion of publications, overcoming the language barrier, is of interest only for political reasons and for institutions representing different nations, such as WHO, PAHO, EU and alike, or in nations where different languages co-exist. However, it could be argued that overcoming the language barrier may also contribute to the global advance of science, and that it may be a legitimate objective of scientific societies with a vision of a truly international impact and representation. The ISQua journal has been somehow sensitive to this topic, and since 1993 has published the abstracts in Spanish, to make the journal contents more widely available. A next step has been supporting a pre-review process of articles originally in Spanish, before they are translated into English and submitted to the regular peer review process. This experiment has been carried out for 2 years now, in which 10 articles from Latin America and Spain were submitted for the pre-review process. Not all of them are eventually published, but the pre-review in the authors' mother tongue helps them to refine the article, and somehow to assess their potential for publication. In the Editorial Committee meeting held in Boston last September, it was approved that the consultation process for articles in Spanish may continue, thanks to the Spanish speaking reviewers and editorial team that under authors' request carries out a pre-review of articles originally written in this language. At the same time, the abstracts in Spanish will continue to be published in the electronic version of the journal. However, another step will be taken, more directly related to spread the diffusion of the articles published in the journal: when an article not originally written in English is accepted for publication, the authors will be offered the possibility of submitting also the version in their mother tongue, once the corrections suggested by the reviewer and the editors for the English version have been also incorporated into the original version of the paper. The journal will then publish the article in both languages in the electronic version, making possible for readers to access the information in other languages at the same time that it is published in English. Because editorial office is not able to verify the accuracy of the translations, only the English-language version published in the journal will stand as the official reference of the paper. The original-language version will be made available as a courtesy to readers under the authors' responsibility. New technology developments may make possible in the future to confidently translate at low or no cost into different languages the journal articles, and make them available and useful worldwide, regardless the authors and readers mother tongue. But time to start actively supporting publications for non-English speaking authors and to make science available in the same language in which it is produced is already here. Overcoming the language barrier is a win–win situation. All of us may benefit more easily from everybody else's experiences and knowledge.

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