News

We are excited to issue our August 2020 update on the project progress. You can see some preliminary results from our searches for non-English-language literature on conservation, including how many journals/articles we have already screened, and how the relevant papers identified are distributed geographically.

Read the update here.

We have recently started working on another component of the project, which aims to understand language barriers to the application of English-language knowledge on biodiversity conservation. This component tries to understand how decision-makers perceive language as a barrier to the use of science in their conservation decision making.

For this, we are recruiting collaborators to help us list national-level reports on biodiversity and its conservation in non-English-speaking countries, investigate the number of references cited there, and do a questionnaire survey with the authors of the reports (also see below). We have already recruited 14 country coordinators so if you are interested in becoming one please reach out for further details.

Tatsuya will be giving a keynote presentation titled “Flying over the Tower of Babel: Implications of language barriers on shorebird conservation” at the first ever International Shorebird Twitter Conference 2020 (7 – 8 October 2020), an online global event as part of the International Wader Study Group’s 50th anniversary.

The conference is still seeking submissions, so visit the website for more detail and be part of this exciting event!

It is a great pleasure to welcome our new member, Pablo Negret, to the translatE project!

Pablo will be working on implications of language diversity in vertebrate conservation. See People for his research interests and what he has been working on so far.

We are looking for potential collaborators and students who are keen to work on language barriers in science. There are multiple scholarships (although highly competitive!) for graduate students at the University of Queensland, with the next application for the International Scholarship opening on the 27th June.

If you are interested, please send your two-page CV and one-page summary of your research interest to Tatsuya Amano through our Contact Page to discuss possibilities.