Portfolio - translatE | Transcending language barriers to environmental science

03 Dec Berdejo-Espinola, V., Hajas, A., Cornford, R., Ye, N. & Amano, T. (2025) Spanish-language text classification for environmental evidence synthesis using multilingual pre-trained models. Environmental Evidence 14: 21.

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A persistent challenge in environmental evidence syntheses is that these remain predominantly monolingual (English), leading to biased results and misinforming cross-scale policy decisions. We trained supervised machine learning models using a corpus of Spanish-language peer-reviewed academic articles on biodiversity conservation. The best-performing model achieved a...

30 Sep Amano, T., Ramírez-Castañeda, C., Berdejo-Espinola, V., Borokini, I., Chowdhury, S., Golivets, M., González-Trujillo, J.D., Montaño-Centellas, F., Paudel, K., White, R.L. & Veríssimo, D. (2025) Language, economic and gender disparities widen the scientific productivity gap. PLOS Biology 23: e3003372.

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Women, non-native English speakers and those from low-income countries are disadvantaged in science but by how much? We found that women with non-English first languages from low-income countries publish up to 70% fewer in English than their counterparts....

29 Aug Burton-Jones, A., Amano, T., Boyce, J., Chau, P., Feng, J. (Jane), Guzman, I.R., Jarvenpaa, S., li, J. (Celeste), Namvar, M., Padmanabhan, B., Pineda, J., Richet, J.-L., Sarker, S., Sharma, S., Vogel, D., Wang, H. and Yoon, V. (2025) This Article is Not Just in English: Making Science More Inclusive and Impactful with Artificial Intelligence Translation. Australasian Journal of Information Systems 29.

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With AI translation tools advancing rapidly, in this paper we ask what truly multilingual science could look like and how we might get there....

29 Aug Amano, T., Bowker, L. and Burton-Jones, A. (2025) AI-mediated translation presents two possible futures for academic publishing in a multilingual world. PLOS Biology 23(6): e3003215.

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As the availability and performance of artificial intelligence for language editing and translation continues to improve, we can imagine a future in which everyone can use their own language to write, assess, and read science. The question is, how can we achieve it?...

21 May Hannah, K., Fuller, R.A. Smith, R.K., Sutherland, W.J. and Amano, T. (2025) Language barriers in conservation science citation networks. Conservation Biology.

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In this paper we showed that non-English papers receive citations largely from the same language, indicating that conservaiton evidence rarely crosses language barriers....

05 Feb Berdejo-Espinola, V. and Amano, T. (2025) Assessing diverse values of nature requires multilingual evidence. Nature Reviews Biodiversity 1: 5–6.

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This paper argues that global assessments of people’s values of nature should be based on multilingual evidence to capture the plurality of nature’s values across cultures and languages, avoid overlooking valuable knowledge, and inform policy and decision-making on the basis of unbiased evidence....

04 Feb Amano, T. and Berdejo-Espinola, V. (2025) Language barriers in conservation: consequences and solutions. Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

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This review first describes, with evidence based on a growing body of literature, three types of language barriers in evidence-based conservation. It also provides a checklist of solutions that can be adopted by individuals, institutions, journals, conferences, and funders for overcoming three types of language...

25 Mar Arenas-Castro, H., Berdejo-Espinola, V., Chowdhury, S., Rodríguez-Contreras, A., James, A.R.M., Raja, N.B., et al.. (2024) Academic publishing requires linguistically inclusive policies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 291: 20232840.

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This study examined the linguistic policies of 736 journals in biological sciences and revealed that scientific journals are doing minimal efforts to foster a multilingual community of authors and readers....

20 Mar Wei, H., Berdejo-Espinola, V., Ma, Y. & Amano, T. (2024) Content analysis of nature documentaries in China: challenges and opportunities to raise public conservation awareness. Biological Conservation 292: 110522.

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This paper investigated the challenges and opportunities for nature documentaries in China to raise public conservation awareness, by investigating their thematic, geographical, and taxonomic coverages....

08 Feb Hannah, K., Haddaway, N.R., Fuller, R.A. & Amano, T. (2024) Language inclusion in ecological systematic reviews and maps: Barriers and perspectives. Research Synthesis Methods.

Posted at 11:37h in

By assessing 72 systematic reviews and maps published in Environmental Evidence, this paper revealed the barriers that limit authors' ability or intent to find and include non-English-language literature....

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