It is our pleasure to give you the second project update of the year, especially on our two new papers and important media coverages.
Hope you enjoy it and look forward to continuing and developing collaboration with you for the rest of the year.
Many thanks for your support!
Tatsuya was interviewed by the Royal Society of Chemistry’s magazine, Chemistry World, for an article on the dominance of English in science and its consequences.
The article nicely covers views from a variety of experts on this issue and is well worth a read (and a very nice header image!).
Read the article here: Publish in English or perish.
Our new paper “Language barriers in global bird conservation” led by Pablo Negret has been published in PLOS ONE.
By combining global datasets of distributions of 10,863 bird species and 119 official languages in 252 countries/territoris in the world, we showed that a surprisingly large number of languages are spoken within the distribution of each bird species. For example, 1,587 bird species have 10 languages or more spoken within their distributions.
Importantly, we also showed threatened and migratory species have significantly more languages spoken within their distributions. Particularly high numbers of species with many languages within their distribution are found in Eastern Europe, Russia and central and western Asia.
Read the Open Access paper here.
Also explore our Bird Language Diversity app, where you can see where in the world particularly many species are associated with each language.
We are pleased to see our work is featured in The Guardian’s series “The age of extinction”.
Read the article here: Lost in translation: is research into species being missed because of a language barrier?
Our new paper “Growth of non-English-language literature on biodiversity conservation” led by Shawan Chowdhury has been published in Conservation Biology.
We show that, contrary to a common perception, the number of non-English-language articles on conservation published per year has been increasing over the past 39 years, at a rate similar to English-language articles. This indicate that non-English-language literature will continue to play an important role in conservation.
This work is based on another great collaboration with native speakers of the 15 languages. We would like to thank all the amazing collaborators for their huge contribution!
Read the Open Access article here.
It is our great pleasure to release the first project update of the year – non-English literature database in Conservation Evidence, new preprint, new members, and so on.
Hope you enjoy it and look forward to continuing/developing collaboration in the year 2022. Many thanks for your support.
We are excited to see that the non-English-language studes we identified in this study are now all stored as a part of the Conservation Evidence database.
This is a huge step forward towards fully incorporating scientific evidence available in non-English languages into evidence-based conservation.
Many thanks again to all collaborators and the Conservation Evidence team!
A big warm welcome to another new member – Marina Corella!
Marina has just started their PhD with Tatsuya and Prof Rich Fuller about international environmental agreements and legislation around migratory bird conservation. They will also work on consequences of language barriers for developing agreements among countries. Very exciting!
Marina has also been contributing to many other parts of the translatE project to date and we look forward to continueing the collaboration.
Happy New Year everyone!
We are very happy to start the new year with a new member – Haonan Wei!
Haonan will soon start an honours project in environmental science at the University of Queensland. She has a strong interest in the role of popular science as an important medium to gain public attention to environmental issues, and will be working on the consequences of language barriers in nature documentaries.
A big warm welcome to Haonan!
Since September Tatsuya has been busy presenting the outcome of the translatE project at five seminar series/conferences. These were amazing opportunities and thanks so much for the invitations and productive discussions!