Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication: How Far Can Technology Take Us and What Else Can We Do?

Disparities created by the use of English as the key language for scholarly publishing are becoming increasingly clear in many disciplines.Tatsuya Amano et al. ( 2023) surveyed environmental scientists around the globe and found that it takes non-native speakers of English substantially more time, effort, and money to read and write articles in English.Jacky Deng and Alison Flynn (2023, 1529) interviewed non-Anglophone graduate students in chemistry and learned that for many, communicating research in English is "their most pervasive challenge."In the field of digital humanities (DH), Puthiya Purayil Sneha (2022, 15) emphasizes that "the prevalent global discourse around DH is largely Anglocentric," while Roopika Risam (2018, 79) points out that this often leads to "centering epistemologies and ontologies of the Global North, namely the U.S. and western Europe, which in turn decenters those of Indigenous communities and the Global South."Scholars who publish in languages other than English are cited less often (Di Bitetti and Ferreras 2017), and there is "a persistent lack of international representation on editorial boards" (Espin et al. 2017).But while the problems stemming from the use of a single language for science are becoming ever clearer, the path forward is less obvious.For instance, if all scholars publish in their own language, how will others evaluate, discover, or read their work?Some are pinning their hopes on technologies, such as automatic translation tools (e.g., Google Translate) and tools based on large language models (LLMs) (e.g., ChatGPT) that are becoming increasingly prevalent.In principle, such tools could support the use of multiple languages in the scholarly communication ecosystem.Imagine a scenario where an author from Chile submits a manuscript to a journal in Spanish.The editor identifies a subject expert in Japan, who uses a translation tool to get a version in Japanese and then prepares their peer review feedback in Japanese.This goes back to the editor, who machine translates the feedback into Spanish for the author.Following revisions, the article is published in Spanish, but scholars in Greece, Egypt, Thailand,