News

21 May 2021 AER Live: Why language matters in conservation and what you can do

Tatsuya will be organising a workshop on 27th May (11:00 BST / 07:00 BRT / 20:00 AEST) for AER Live by the Applied Ecology Resources.

Why language matters in conservation and what you can do

Language barriers in science – difficulties faced when conducting and communicating science in situations involving multiple languages – have attracted little attention in conservation. However, increasingly, it has become apparent that overcoming language barriers is key to understanding the biodiversity crisis and successfully delivering conservation outcomes. In this workshop we will discuss why it is important to address language barriers in conservation and how we can start tackling this issue today.

Register by 25th May here.

16 Apr 2021 translatE awarded the UQ internal grant for mentoring and diversity in biology

We are delighted to announce that the translatE has just been awarded the UQ internal grant for mentoring and diversity in biology.

With this we plan to expand our work on identifying academic journals committed to tackling language barriers. We look forward to sharing with you some more outcomes from this project component.

07 Apr 2021 April 2021 update on the progress of the translatE project

We are excited to issue our first project update of the year!

It contains the progress of the project components, and links to our recent publications, presentations as well as a list of academic journals committed to addressing language barriers.

Read the update here.

Hope you will enjoy it. Many thanks for your continued support and look forward to sharing more about the project with you.

08 Mar 2021 List of academic journals committed to tackling language barriers

Publishing in English is hard for many but some English-language journals do a great job in reducing language barriers.

We have started a list of academic journals committed to tackling language barriers to acknowledge their efforts and inform non-native English speakers.

We have already 15 journals listed here – all have a great initiative/scheme for seriously solving this issue for non-native English speakers. If you know any other examples, please add information here or widely circulate this list to anyone who might be interested, thanks!

15 Feb 2021 A new paper published in One Earth

A new paper “Culturally diverse expert teams have yet to bring comprehensive linguistic diversity to intergovernmental ecosystem assessments” based on a collaboration with IPBES fellows has just been published in One Earth.

We looked at how linguistic diversity is represented in eight IPBES assessment reports and found that references cited were predominantly in English and comments from Anglophone reviewers were also overrepresented in those reports.

Read the paper here.

02 Feb 2021 Presentation at AIMOS2020 “Is non-English-language Literature Important in Science?” now available

You can now see Tatsuya’s talk at the 2020 annual meeting of the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science (AIMOS2020) here:

19 Jan 2021 Honours projects now available

Two honours projects, at the University of Queensland, on language barriers in conservation science are now available and we are looking for students who are interested in joining our translatE project.

The first project aims to understand the prevalence and drivers of including non-English language studies in environmental evidence synthesis. See here for more detail.

The second project will be a collaboration with researchers at the Zoological Society of London and aims to test how literature searches in languages other than English can improve the coverage of data for the development of the Living Planet Index – one of the most important biodiversity indicators summarising changes in global vertebrate populations (www.livingplanetindex.org). See here for more detail.

Please contact us if you are interested or circulate the information to anyone who might be interested in working on these exciting projects!

13 Jan 2021 Presentation “The translatE project: our aims and progress so far in overcoming language barriers in conservation science” now available

Tatsuya gave a talk on the aims and progress of the translatE project at the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science, the University of Queensland, which is now available online here:

07 Jan 2021 A correspondence article published in Nature Ecology & Evolution

A correspondence article “Monolingual searches can limit and bias results in global literature reviews” has just been published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

This is a collaboration with Martin Nuñez, who is also committed to tackling language barriers in science, and in response to a perspective article reviewing problems with literature reviews.

Read the article here.

18 Dec 2020 December 2020 update on the progress of the translatE project

We are excited to issue our final project update of the year!

You can see some more preliminary results from our searches for non-English-language literature on conservation, including how study designs adopted differ among languages, how many species are covered in each language, and how those species covered by non-English-language studies differ from those covered by English-language studies.

You can also see the progress of our survey on the use of non-English-language references in domestic report on biodiversity conservation. We show that references cited in those reports are predominantly in non-English-language papers and grey literature

Read the update here.

Many thanks again for your support and look forward to sharing more about the project with you in the new year.